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tagDiv Member
Christopher is a long time WordPress user. Anything else you need to know is private ;-) I *do not* work for TagDiv, but I've been using their themes since late 2013.
simchris
tagDiv Member

Try changing to default theme. Debug from there?
Bbpress and news seo not part of this theme, obviously.
Thats usually how i start to debug pesky plugins.

simchris
tagDiv Member

You could post basic CPU usage — but not really relevant if it’s not your server dedicated to your website, as any CPU usage would be for the “entire” box with all websites, and not just your site — unless you have a VPN which splinters the system into chunks and shows just the CPU usage for your “container.”

But anyway … you likely need to wait for official tagdiv support folk to help any further 🙂

simchris
tagDiv Member

You need to regenerate thumbnails for your site once theme is installed to generate all the various sizes for the blocks/modules. You should not use the demo data for a live or real website, only for testing or client demo (speaking as a 20 year webdev myself).

You can of course simply upload images via FTP if you don’t plan to use them as ‘featured’ images — for ‘featured’ images you generally need to upload those via the media manager or use a third party solution/plugin (e.g., bulk uploader to media manager).

Or combo of FTP upload with plugin to move to media manager, e.g.,
http://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/bulk-upload-files-to-wordpress-media-library-using-ftp/

For questions about how to use WORDPRESS — which is not part of the theme — you should of course check the millions of pages of help on the web via Google, and of course the WordPress CODEX .. often you can do searches like “image upload wordpress codex” to find help quickly.

You can change the default upload directory, and you can turn off the upload by /month/day/ options easily.

Obviously you should expect the TagDiv support folk to educate you on how the basics of WordPress actually works — only elements related to using the theme. Image uploading is part of WordPress and not a “theme” function, per se.

I don’t work here – so just some feedback while you wait for official reply 🙂

simchris
tagDiv Member

I think so !

Lucian should be back soon for support methinks.

I think you can request the older version from contact@tagdiv.com (unless they changed that).

simchris
tagDiv Member

Likely good to look at the suggestions from GTmetrix on what to fix …

anything below ’60’ usually means gzip/deflate not actually enabled; and time to live settings not properly set, etc. — but GTmetrix is good at spelling out WHAT the heck is wrong with suggestions.

Remember you should not have more than 4 things being loaded from external sources, or it does really slow down the site as all that other stuff has to be loaded every time a page is loaded in browser.

Also better to test a post page than home page, since few actually go to your home page from search online or RSS, etc.

All those maps things loading from Google slow things down.

And loading 50 CSS/js files is realllllllllllly bad.

You need to seriously cut down on the plugins, find better ones without so much CSS, so many hooks into jquery, see link at bottom of TagDiv speed docs info about tips to optimize contact form 7; figure out how to hide CSS from loading on pages where not being used, etc.

Your weather widget is loading five (5) files!! That’s awful.

You might have to hack all that stuff to load via “sync” mode; possibly use the speed booster framework to queue it properly (see docs — not simple).

With all the crap you’re loading (sorry), you should ALSO not use any Google fonts at all and load ONLY ‘web safe’ fonts like Georgia, Arial, Verdana, etc.

Loading this giant file likely not good:
https://cisocial.net/social/file/pic/yndirectory/2015/04/4ff3adbcaf396e4f41b4928574fa4392_200.png could save 379.0KiB (96% reduction).

This is whacko too
•http://cisocial.net/wp-content/plugins/wp-user-frontend-pro/assets/js/jquery-ui-timepicker-addon.js?ver=4.2.2 (38.4KiB)
•http://cisocial.net/wp-includes/js/jquery/ui/datepicker.min.js?ver=1.11.4 (29.7KiB)

70KB for a date picker???

You have a *lot* of work to do!

Start by removing everything that is badly implemented/coded (like the above weather and date picker stuff), cut back on the Google fonts, etc.

Page should not take longer than 1.5 seconds to load, ideally and your home page is about twice the size it should be ideally (put another way if you remember flopy diskettes? Your page takes 2 full floppies of data to load!!!!):
Page load time: 8.97s
Total page size: 2.73MB
Total number of requests: 161

simchris
tagDiv Member

Tagdiv will ask for link to your website to see your issue 🙂

simchris
tagDiv Member

Yes… it’s coming sometime this month!
They apparently are in the final testing phase now.

simchris
tagDiv Member

Error 503 is server overload, as you likely know.
Check your server error logs to see WHAT is causing it to die.

If it’s the issue with the CPU spikes, then you might have to request the older version of Visual Composer, due to a semi-rare issue with some web servers.

See: https://forum.tagdiv.com/topic/newsmag-1-7-1-killed-our-server-again/

Make sure you disable ALL your other plugins EXCEPT for Visual Composer as starting point!

simchris
tagDiv Member

Did you bother to do the optimizations for YOUR SITE which must be done — ?
No theme can optimize your web server, WordPress install, etc. It’s only designed to be optimized for what the theme does, but YOU still have to properly optimize your site.

a) note the sticky post top of the forum on how to optimize your site/server
>> https://forum.tagdiv.com/topic/tutorial-chriss-custom-optimizations-for-functions-php-etc/

b) note the theme docs (link right side of page) for how to speed up your site and what was done to make the demo so fast (e.g., caching, etc.).
>> https://forum.tagdiv.com/how-to-make-the-site-faster/

WordPress is managed on your end as are all your server settings, htaccess settings, etc.

This is necessary regardless of the theme you use!

Hope that helped 🙂

(( I don’t work here just use the themes for our network, so pretty savvy! ))

  • This reply was modified 11 years by simchris.
simchris
tagDiv Member

Cool… Well you posted the solution didnt work, so was suggesting a fix to set a featured image for posts without a featured image, and which fixes it permanently for wordpress and not theme specific.

Cheers.

simchris
tagDiv Member

Ah, well Auto Post Thumbnail Pro also allows you to assign a default image to all posts and make that the featured image. Worth a look (I have not monetary interest in the plugin).

simchris
tagDiv Member

You might try the plugin I use a lot … Auto Post Thumbnail Pro (on Envato) … it will create a new thumbnail and set as ‘featured’ based on first image in post, even if external image. I use it on all our sites as most of ours pre-date the use of ‘feautured’ image in WP, and so it’s an awesome tool. Might or might not be what you’re looking for, but it’s cheap. 🙂

simchris
tagDiv Member

ALSO:
since it got buried a bit …

LUCIAN … when you can, note my item a few posts back this thread about updated code for hiding the SHIM on post page meta to not load CSS every page.

Was trying not to start new thread which would confuse a lot of folks 🙂

(but I will if I have to … nyah hah hahhhh!)

simchris
tagDiv Member

@ShowbizCool
wow…. awesome news. 🙂

simchris
tagDiv Member

@Bryson T
well gosh and thank you kind sir!

I always feel like I’m giving back. On the old forum I used to haunt for our ecom system there was always this one guy providing all kinds of “dumbed down” info for us newbies and it was often the only way I could figure something out.

I guess I kind of took on that role ’round here for a bit. Sadly my time here will be coming to an end as it does from time to time where I ‘disappear’ for a month or two, but often I have time to “haunt” this forum as I’m often stuck doing things during the day where I have tiny little windows of nothing to do but wait … and I can only stomach so much on Facebook or checking out autoweek.com, etc. — so I circle back to here. And sometimes I see a question … and think .. HEY! I had same issue, I know what to do !

Since TagDiv has great support, I really do NOT need to do that 90& of the time (obviously!), but sometimes I do have a unique perspective having done this so freakin’ long now.

In any case, thanks for the kind words (how DO I get a ‘tip jar’ on here???) (kidding)

Peace out 🙂

simchris
tagDiv Member

Yes.. you need to change it to whatever YOUR data key happens to be for your existing counts.

Mine is “views” – yours might be something totally different based on whatever plugin you were using before. The theme plugin can’t “magically” figure out your reads from the past unless you were ALREADY counting those since day one or whenever.

So, typically if you were using a plugin there might be a data field (sometimes a custom field you can find at bottom of your post editing pages with other custom fields), and if the plugin was from Acme co, they might have made a data field like
acme_post_views

so, you would then need to update the theme file to tell it to READ and WRITE to that existing field (in my case it’s ‘views’ — for the theme if you have no other counter, it would now use the “post_views_count” — you will see this field in the custom fields at bottom of your posts when editing one).

SO, *you* need to figure out what your old data field is and put THAT field into the php file. 🙂

simchris
tagDiv Member

You don’t need to post same question in both forums!

Only for the theme you’re actually using!

See answer in the Newsmag forum where you posted same question.

simchris
tagDiv Member

That is probably a widget … so you have to add it to a ‘widget area’ or shortcode for that plugin.

So either create a widget area first, or add to a custom sidebar for home page (like I do for the weather widget). You add widgets to sidebars in appearance > widgets.

The plugin doesn’t add a Visual Composer “element.”

https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-polls/installation/

  • This reply was modified 11 years by simchris.
simchris
tagDiv Member

You have to change the data field for the php file to whatever your existing views datafield is (in my case it was ‘views’)

Edit this file:
/includes/wp-booster/td_page_views.php

change the field name here (at top of file) to whatever your existing datafield name is for views:

static $post_view_counter_key = 'views';

simchris
tagDiv Member

@gfran5
Be sure to update this also once you have 4.3.5 installed (I didn’t try that .. doh).

Curious how NM1.71 and VC435 work together. In fact, not sure anybody in this thread has actually tried that (not that you should worry it won’t work or anything).

-Chris

simchris
tagDiv Member

So perhaps look at the META data for those sites vs the one with the issue and make sure they are identical.

Also note Facebook isn’t always consistent — the OG tags are “hints” — they don’t have to actually DO anything — you’re not paying them to do this stuff.

Their whole system went down the other day, and I’ve been having tons of problems with setting up promoted posts this week too.

In any case, best of luck in sorting that out — it’s a pain!

simchris
tagDiv Member

Marius/Radu..
going to post this here since relevant to the SHIM users and also those who follow my thread on optimizations … somebody brought up good point I had forgotten about …. any ideas for updating this functions.php element to remove the SHIM css from the post pages … this code you provided for the VC plugin obviously doesn’t work for the SHIM; and I have hunch we might have to put something into one of the booster files also?

——–old code you created to hide VC css from post pages — does not hide SHIM css on post pages————snip:

add_action('init', 'myoverride', 100);
function myoverride() {
remove_action('wp_head', array(visual_composer(), 'addMetaData'));
}

function dequeue_visual_composer_css() {
if (is_single()) {
wp_dequeue_style('js_composer_front');
}
}
add_action('wp_enqueue_scripts', 'dequeue_visual_composer_css', 1003);

———-/snip

thank you kindly 🙂

  • This reply was modified 11 years by simchris.
simchris
tagDiv Member

FYI
when you don’t have an author name it will typically show full URL.

Normally when you have a proper author tag for a story, it will truncate the URL.

So you would see:

mysite.xyzz | by Name Here

otherwise they often will do

http://mysite.zyzz

Likely a good idea to spend some time on the FB developer site and forums to see how they use the OG meta data you place in your head area, so you can ‘dial that in’ the way you want them to actually grab it, where possible.

simchris
tagDiv Member

Sorry … hit return and somehow deleted my message.

Meant to say — you can try using fewer dbase queries by having fewer blocks on homepage, try having fewer queries in sidebar, possibly not use the “suggested flyout” and also not use the megamenu. The more “go grab stuff” items you have the more it slows down dbase.

ALSO: be sure to increase your default memory with both php.ini / host panel *and* in your wp-config.php file (WP defaults to 40MB unless you actually edit your wp-config.php file to increase; it needs to be at least 64MB with 128MB recommended).

simchris
tagDiv Member

Absolutely true. Everything “weird” started with 4.4 and when they started adding a bunch of new things for WooCommerce and adding some things which I think were designed to roll-in things others were selling as extensions/add-ons to VC.

So, for low traffic site, VC 4.42 and Newsmag 1.71 work fine. High traffic site and VC 4.5x .. not so much.

With VC 4.3.5 we never had *any* problems. Newsmag 1.71 good to update to for the WP security fixes, and then try to either use shim, or older version of VC.

AGAIN TO ANY AND ALL: issue *not* with the theme — it’s nothing TagDiv ‘needs to fix’ with new theme version. It’s an issue with Visual Composer from WP Bakery, bundled with theme to provide dashboard and additional widgets for custom layouts. Issue doesn’t impact ALL sites/servers. Oddly it seems worse with those of use with dedicated servers, but really weird things happen. Only real solution — I think — is for VC to fully re-write their code from ground up based on current version of WP, optimize it, and possibly break some things into extensions that most people don’t use. Why have all the code bloat for WooCommerce if not using that on a magazine site?

Anyway…. just my input on this topic since I was one affected. I don’t speak for TagDiv in any way… just my opinions.

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