Yes! That’s what I was looking for, thank you. 🙂

Well, yeah, I thought it was strange, too. Apparently is more common than we think, in live news sites, especially for hot topics that can last a few hours – eg. reporting and commenting on election results as they come. 😉

— An update – I found some postview leakage.

During a parallel investigation of why the views are generally lower while they used to be really high before the redesign, and google analytics even showing more that the ajax view counter, I realized one unpredicted case that causes views to disappear.

So my client has a method of writing an article: He begins it, publishing it for the people to see that something is happening, then keeps updating it with all details as they happen. The strange thing, was that he got a comment that the post views one moment were 80, the other moment were a mere 30 on a certain article.

It got me thinking. And I found the culprit: That custom field in Editing mode, doesn’t get Ajax updates as they happen. So when the client updates the article, he unknowingly updates it to the number of views it had when he first clicked to edit it.

I’m reporting it just in case you are interested in doing something about it, And maybe it solves another fellow’s wondering as to why their pageviews get lost.

You are welcome, thanks for taking the time to read my question.

Hi Bogdan.
This is not what I asked. In case you missed it:

Manually updating post views by hand won’t work – the website has a lot of traffic already and 20-30 new articles each day.

That’s about 800-900 new articles a month!

I know how to update views manually of course but that’s not the point… The point is to do it algorithmically, for all posts, past, present and future, without my further involvement and without anyone having to keep track and waste their time doing such a thing.

Also I don’t want to add a few hundred views on a few posts. Visitors should get a consistent and gradual image of pageviews any time of the day.

So, if you happen to have any idea how to cook pageviews on the front end -and only in the front end, we don’t want to harm the data in the database-, please share..

Hi.
If it’s not a bug but a feature, then you need to fix consistency with the other filters. Because if you limit the post showed to 1, and choose another filter (e.g. category filter), then the 1 slide block renders normally with just one slide (which shouldn’t, according to the default design you mention).

Then if you do that, it would be useful to not allow the users putting value number 1 in the posts limit field of the said block, to protect them from making mistakes and scratching their heads if things don’t go as expected. Or you can also add this special instruction to the documentation page you directed me in your first answer.

But well, all this is so counter-intuitive. And what’s the point in making the user’s life harder than easier?

If the user chooses to show just 1 slide in the posts limit, then maybe there is a hidden need underneath, and perhaps they believe they can achieve the expected result with what they have.

Maybe there is a lack of a big non-sliding block such as the homepage post, for an important article at the top and maybe a couple important articles in the middle, which can be used multiple times across the page and doesn’t affect the background ads the site may have implemented.

The slide block could easily do the job and double up as Big Single Block and cover this need (and a further improvement would be to disable the display of the next and prev buttons on hover if there is just one slide in the slide block, for whatever the reason).

In any case, why don’t you consider it?
It’s friendly, honest feedback, to make your product even better than it already is.

Hi again!

Actually, the single slide works well in general, it’s just the specific post id filter that has the issue.

If I remove a single bracket, the page hangs (it doesn’t render anything below header), as expected. Removing both brackets of the ‘if’ condition, doesn’t help either.

But if I change the condition in line 21, from:
if ($this->td_query->have_posts() and $this->td_query->found_posts > 1 ) { ... }
to
if ($this->td_query->have_posts() and $this->td_query->found_posts > 0 ) { ... }
then the condition (with just 1 post id) is met and my problem solved!

Thanks for pointing me to the right direction. Please consider correcting this bug on the next release, it’s such an easy fix after all, and it’ll be good usability-wise 🙂

Please walk with me through the steps, and try to point me to the mistake.

Here’s what i do.
1. I have a plugin to show the IDS of the posts. Here’s a list. Let’s take the first one.

2. This is the homepage layout. There are single slide blocks in at least 2 places as you can see.

3. Let’s pick the first slide block. The behavior is the same for the second one, too.

4. This is the general settings tab. 1 slide only.

5. This is the filters tab. Let’s put the ID of the latest post: 5892. Sort order is set to -Latest-. (Any id I have tried so far gives me the same non-rendering result. The same is true for the sort orders, too).

6. This is the result – the block doesn’t even render!

7. This is what is should look like (this is the result when I pick to show the latest post from a specific category).

8. This is the filters tab of Big Grid 7 block, just below the first slide block, with post IDs. – It works as expected.

This helped a lot, thanks very much! 🙂

Nevermind, I found the typo in the code. It works fine now

Hi. That ain’t very helpful maintenance-wise, but it must do the job for the moment. (By the way is there an eta for the feature to be implemented? )

In the meanwhile, I created 10 more custom spots, following the instructions above. Now, though i can see them in the theme panel, I still need to be able to choose them in my layout from visual composer. How do I do that?

Can I do this (adding custom spots) somehow on the child theme? Because if I do this on the main theme, I will lose everything at the next update. [And probably I won’t remember the changes I made anyway.]