Bill Robbins

[Bill Robbins]

Hi Mark,

Sorry for the trouble there. I took a look and it appears that there is a navigation menu plugin installed on the site. It’s perfectly fine to use that, but you’d need to ask the developer of the plugin about the drop down menus. They should be able to help you out there. If you run into any trouble with the one that’s bundled with the theme, let me know and I can help you out there.

Take care,
Bill

[Bill Robbins]

Hi Jason,

That is interesting there. I’m not 100% certain what is up there. The idea behind the equal heights row is to have an image on one side via a widget’s background and have it stretch to be the same height as the other widgets next to it. Then a background color is applied to the entire row to keep things even. In this case that won’t help out since they are arranged a bit differently.

Here’s what I would do. Edit the widget that has the hours in it. Switch to the text side of the editor from the visual one. The last line there, change it to this:

<p style="text-align: center; padding-bottom: 8px;">Wednesday - Sunday: 5pm - 9pm</p>

That should give us padding on the bottom of that line vs. the container. Applying padding to the container itself probably won’t change the height because some javascript is adjusting the height to try and make them equal. I probably need a couple pixel adjustment in that javascript.

Applying a bit of padding to one of the elements inside the container should cause the overall height to change. Hopefully that will do the trick at least.

Hopefully that will do the trick for you.

Have a great weekend,
Bill

[Bill Robbins]

There is a plugin you can install and activate called WP Pagenavi to replace the pagination there. The theme has a hook built in that the plugin can use to replace the default pagination. That would be the easiest option for you.

Take care,
Bill

[Bill Robbins]

Excellent question Barbara. The WordPress exporter only exports content like pages, posts, navigation menus, products and items like that. It doesn’t include any settings or even widgets.

So there are two options for you here. You can either move everything over by hand. That’s a bit tedious, but it’s also not technically hard and is also free. The other option is to use a backup plugin/service to copy the site, database and all, and set it up as your staging one.

BackupBuddy is a paid plugin, but it works really well at exporting and importing sites/moving them. That’s basically what you’re doing here. Some of the other plugins do make backups, but they don’t have an import tool to go with them so you’d have to manually add the database in your web host’s admin and then change the site and admin URL’s in the settings table of that database. It’s a bit more technical, but it’s less error prone than copying the settings manually.

Some web hosts also have built in staging sites. It’s one of the many things I like about WP Engine. There is a button in the admin to copy the site to staging and another one to copy from staging to live. It makes testing and development much easier.

Hope that helps out,
Bill

[Bill Robbins]

Hi Allison,

Questions are fine. That line in the plugin looks like this:

$progress_full = $total_given / $campaign_goal * 100;

In straight English it is a quick equation that takes the total given in the campaign and divides it by the campaign goal and then multiplies it by 100. That gives us the percentage towards the goal that has been collected.

The error indicates that there is division by zero in that line which would seem to indicate that the campaign goal is either zero or empty. Try double checking the campaign goal. If you don’t have an amount you are raising towards, then you might want to make this a regular “product” and not a campaign. The only real benefit of a campaign is it tracks your total given towards a goal. If you don’t need a goal, then you don’t really need to make it a campaign to collect money.

Let me know how it goes,
Bill

[Bill Robbins]

You could add something like this to the Custom CSS to turn that link into a button:

a .more-link {
  padding: 5px 10px;
  background-color: #000;
  color: #fff;
}

a:hover .more-link {
  background-color: #fff;
  color: #000;
}

The top style there would be for the default state of the link and the second one is for the hover. Feel free to change the colors there to whatever you’d like to have.

Hope that helps out,
Bill

[Bill Robbins]

You could add something like this to the Custom CSS to turn that link into a button:

a .more-link {
  padding: 5px 10px;
  background-color: #000;
  color: #fff;
}

a:hover .more-link {
  background-color: #fff;
  color: #000;
}

The top style there would be for the default state of the link and the second one is for the hover. Feel free to change the colors there to whatever you’d like to have.

Hope that helps out,
Bill

[Bill Robbins]

Hi Wendy,

You could add this to your Custom CSS to add a dollar sign before the input box for your donations:

.name_price label:after { content: '$'; margin-right: -20px; }

That should place it just outside the input to make it a bit clearer that it is already there.

---

Each product in WooCommerce has a checkbox to disable the reviews. Edit your donation product and uncheck the box for reviews and that should take that section out for you.

---

The 503 error in the screenshot looks like it is coming from a separate site. You might look at the widgets there and see if any of them are pulling content from someplace else.

Take care,
Bill

[Bill Robbins]

If you’d like me to login and see if I can spot anything, I will. Just send over a login and I’ll take a look. There’s not much else I can do from the front end. The child theme loads up just fine with the unmodified theme on my development site.

[Bill Robbins]

Did you attempt to install and activate the child theme I sent?

[Bill Robbins]

I use the code I posted above in virtually every child theme that I create for myself or others. I pulled it directly from a Forward child theme I made for a customer.

At this moment, two copies of the parent theme’s style.css are loading on your site:

<link rel='stylesheet' id='parent-style-css'  href='http://swedishamericanmuseum.org/2.0/wp-content/themes/forward/style.css?ver=4.5.4' type='text/css' media='all' />

and

<link rel='stylesheet' id='forward-main-css'  href='http://swedishamericanmuseum.org/2.0/wp-content/themes/forward/style.css?ver=1.1.4' type='text/css' media='screen' />

I made a very basic child theme for Forward and tested it on my development server. You could download it from https://support.organizedthemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/forward-basic-child.zip and see if it helps you out.

[Bill Robbins]

When I make a copy of your site’s source code and add that snippet to the Custom CSS area, it seems to work for me. The second level drop down appears to the right of “Brunk’s Children’s Museum” menu item.

[Bill Robbins]

When I make a child theme at the present time, I also include a functions.php file in the child theme. It’s a good spot to add any additional functions your site needs, and it also allows you to enqueue the stylesheet from the parent theme instead of using an @include to do so.

Here’s the sample code from a Forward child theme’s functions.php file:

(See support site for code)

Just make sure that there is an opening

[Bill Robbins]

Hi Allison,

Try adding this to your Custom CSS:

.flexnav li ul li {
	overflow: visible; 
}

and see if that won’t do the trick for you.

Bill

[Bill Robbins]

Anytime 🙂

[Bill Robbins]

Great question. BackupBuddy has been a good solid plugin for that for years. It has an import/restore tool that makes restoring your site nice and simple. That’s something that the free plugins generally don’t have. I’ve used WP Backup to Dropbox and it works well. I’ve heard good things about BackWPUp, but I haven’t used it.

Now I use a web host that has automated daily backups and on demand backups. That way they are always there and I can download them any time I need to.

[Bill Robbins]

Backups are good. They’ve saved me many times and I’ve been burned a couple of times for not having good ones. Sounds like a plan. If I can help out, let me know.

[Bill Robbins]

Hi Shannon,

Sorry for the trouble there. You’ll want to delete the parent United theme (the one that is not from us) and then download a fresh copy of it from our downloads page (https://support.organizedthemes.com/downloads/).

For theme updates, WordPress checks the wordpress.org theme directory for themes that have the same folder name. It looks like someone has created a United theme there (https://wordpress.org/themes/united/) and that where the update is pulling from.

In an unfortunate oversight, the update check doesn’t pull in the screenshot of the theme, but just displays the one from the theme that you have installed. The assumption there is that the screenshots will be the same, but it can give a false sense that everything is ok.

You might try adding this to the functions.php file in the child or parent theme. Add it to the very bottom and see if it won’t disable wordpress.org update checks:

(see support site for code)

Let me know if you need any help there.

Take care,
Bill

[Bill Robbins]

Hi Wendy,

Let’s check this. Go to the WooCommerce section of your WordPress dashboard and click on Settings. Then select the checkout tab there. On this screen you’ll see a section for “Checkout Pages.” Make sure that the Checkout Page is set correctly there. That’s the spot where we tell WooCommerce what page is actually where the checkout lives. Since the link to the checkout is not correct, that would be the first spot I would look.

Let me know what you turn up there,
Bill

[Bill Robbins]

Glad to hear that did the trick 🙂

[Bill Robbins]

Thanks Jiri, you too 🙂

[Bill Robbins]

Hi John,

Great question there. You can add in comments for your podcasts. I would suggest adding them to the individual podcast episodes. That way the conversation that develops will go with each podcast and not have all of the podcasts discussed in one thread.

Here’s how you could go about doing this:

1. Go to the Appearance section in your WordPress dashboard and click on Edit.
2. From the list of files on your right, choose single-podcast.php
3. Look down just a bit and you’ll see this line:

   
   <?php the_content(); ?>
   

4. Right below that add this:

   
   (See support topic for code snippet)

5. Save your changes.
6. Next choose the functions.php file on your right. Scroll down to the very bottom and add this:

   
   (See support topic for code snippet)

7. Save your changes.

I believe that should add comments to your individual podcast episodes. If you run into any trouble there, let me know.

Take care,
Bill

[Bill Robbins]

There are a couple of ways you can approach that. One would be to use some CSS to apply a min-height to the #home-midde .widget that is equal to the height of the tallest widget. That would cause the shorter widgets to grow so they are the height that you set for the tallest one. The advantage of using a min-height instead of a height is if the content changes in the widget and it needs to be taller than the min-height, it can stretch. If a height is set it won’t allow it to stretch.

You could also use some javascript. To do that you would edit the custom-js.php file and locate this spot:

</script>

and right above that add this:

(See support post for code)

That’s adapted from another theme of mine and not from Bottega so I can’t promise it won’t run into any quirks, but it might work out well.

Take care,
Bill

[Bill Robbins]

Hi Jiri,

All is well here in the deep south of the States. We’re still waiting on autumn which seems to have skipped us so far this year, but all is good.

Great question there. I don’t believe that you can do that with WooCommerce out of the box. There are some extensions out there that can add additional functionality to Woo’s shipping options. I haven’t tried WooCommerce Advanced Free Shipping (https://wordpress.org/plugins/woocommerce-advanced-free-shipping/) but it looks like it may be able to give free shipping to certain zip codes. You might give it a shot.

Take care,
Bill

[Bill Robbins]

Hi Bill,

Great questions. The Event Calendar’s link is bit unusual in that there is not a “page” for your event calendar. If you go to pages in your WordPress dashboard you won’t find an actual page there for it. It’s actually an archive of all the events.

But you can still change it. Go to the Events section in your dashboard and click on Settings. On that screen you’ll see a spot for the events URL slug. Right there you’ll find the URL to your event’s “page.”

Copy that and go to the Appearance section and select Menus. On the left there you’ll see types of default content that you can add to your navigation menu. On the right you’ll see the actual menu. There’s a quick video at https://vimeo.com/72418137 that can show you how it works a bit better than I can describe with just words.

To edit the Events link, click the down arrow on the right hand side of it and it will open up options for that item. You can change the URL to it there since it is a custom link.

You can also delete any menu items you’d like to. That won’t delete the pages, just the menu item that links to them. Save your changes once you’re finished and that will update your menu.

For your home page, you can drag in a text widget and add it to the home bottom if you want to simply enter text there. The featured post widget is set to occupy two “columns” so to speak on the home page. The other widgets will occupy one column. New widgets are added without content in them.

The ebook on the home page is just a PDF. Many web browsers can open it directly for you or you could download Adobe Acrobat Reader and read it that way if you need to. It’ll give you a bit of an idea about how WordPress works in a general sense. The theme instructions (https://support.organizedthemes.com/epic/) cover items that are more specific to the theme than just general WordPress topics. For actual books WordPress for Dummies is also a pretty good guide for general WordPress knowledge.

As you have questions, let me know and we’ll go from there.

Have a great weekend,
Bill

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