Well, we need the rel=nofollow added — no way a simple functions.php directive is likely to be able to do that. But if you find a way, would love to know. 🙂

Also, fyi, bloating out the functions.php file is just as bad as using multiple plugins.

Always a balance on what you need to do and what is technically possible.

If you’re doing links by hand easy enough to just add the target=new

We’re using code to make all URLs into live links, but also make them load external and make them rel=nofollow. No way to do all 3 in a functions.php filter.

I use a plugin for that …
https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-external-links/

I find allocating 512MB to php helps.

Also try turning off something like the related posts option bottom of posts to cut back on “queries” per page.

We used to use custom SEO tool … now we’re using Yoast as laziness …

there is a great sitemap tool we used to use, still the main alternative to yoast … forget it’s name —

oh yeah here
https://wordpress.org/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

under the “blocks” settings ….

Simplest way is to upload the file from the theme download for Newsmag….
upload via FTP or from your hosting filemanager to /wp-content/themes/Newsmag/functions.php

“somehow got modified” is not a good thing …
nothing in the theme modifies that — so unless you have somebody working on that, you should make sure your site is fully patched and secure with latest version of WordPress 4.2.1 and double check ALL your plugins are updated/patched!

Maybe resave your permalinks.

I think there is a reset in the bottom of the main page of the theme panel ….
but basically simplest thing is do fresh install of theme …. delete the old stuff to start freesh

Simple thing for now — delete the categories… if they are “empty” and you don’t yet have content, then when ready to enable them for a story, turn them on. If a NEW site, trick is to create a good long “description” for the category describing WHAT the cat is going to feature … kind of a “coming soon….” block of text as placeholder, so that the cats are already available to “choose” when creating content — otherwise you have bit of a chicken/egg thing with new website 🙂

I’ll be adding a tip jar link here at some point 😉

(kidding)

Fix for php overload issue …

On some sites with high traffic, large number of page views, large number of pages, online for years and years — you may see warnings on server of php going from “green to yellow” or “green to red” and in our case on ONE site this was happening in weird 5, 10, 20 minute intervals “on the nose.” The site gets pinged a LOT from news aggregators, Google News feeds, etc.

Finally figured out it was NOT home page complex layout, was NOT sidebars, was not anything related to ads (e.g., 3 ads per page vs 2), not related to Disqus or sharing buttons/widgets or Mashshare, etc.

Turned out to be the built-in “related” posts and more from author below each story. Disabling this immediately stopped the pummeling.

For this one website, we reverted to using “Contextual Related Posts” plugin, which we were using on this one site prior to Newsmag, so we knew it already would play nice. So, I now have that running and the plugin is setup to show 5 related posts as “text only” at bottom of each story (above the tag buttons). The plugin caches the most common searches to maintain juicy goodness and not overload the php query system.

This hasn’t been an issue on the other 5 sites, even when limited to only 3 items — but this ONE big site, it just was pushing things right to the “one more straw…” — hitting some CPU peaks of “10” vs normal of “1” or “2” (anything regularly over “4” means something funky going on ….).

So, right now with
(6) x NewsMag Sites
(2) x Newspaper Sites
(1) giant site not running WP
(6) sites running Woo
(2) sites running other (e.g., Udesign)
(10) misc apps, placeholder, ecommerce sites — not using WP

CPU
Last 1 minute 1.78
Last 5 minutes 1.55
Last 15 minutes 1.25

this morning it was running “hot” at “10” …

so, in case you need to “tune” a specific site for high spike-o-ramas, try disabling the “related” items bottom of your post page FIRST (!)

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

I think you can hide those by changing the color of the lines with CSS; forget exactly which classes but it’s a popular mod since Newsmag launched. Obviously you can’t “remove” them without some minor pain as those are “in the grid” for spacing. But lots of folks have changed the color to match the background — I thought there was going to be option for this in theme panel someplace, but could not tell you right now if that happened or not. I’m still on 1.6, prepping for 1.71B this weekend — was waiting to see if there would be sudden “1.72” or something before I did that 😉

If you are going to regenerate thumbs, then changing the default compression level in functions.php good idea.

For your “main” images you likely need to use something like smush.it (I don’t use, don’t know).

Alternately you could download via shell from server, then run something like “caesium” software on image folder, then reupload to server.

We also use the cheap commercial plugin Auto Post Thumbnail PRO as it has nice options to generate image using a default fall back, and even remove images if you mess up 🙂

Problem with FB;
you can use the new “recapture attachment” tool on FB for each post to force capture of image they skipped first time.

As long as you have proper OG tags in header, that is what FB tries to read.

But they often have hiccups.

Facebook routinely has issues capturing data; they have now added a “recapture attachment” drop down when you share something, then click on the time since saved, and then it will be on the arrow… works pretty well … this also solves issue where when you save something it just shows URL for your website and nothing else — the refresh does seem to work.

If you get the dread “timeout lock” where nothing saves … only solution there is to try again later or manually paste in your item.

To install theme, see theme docs.. Link right side of page.

As a reminder —
those folks who actually USE xmlrpc.php
should not use that part of my suggested custom code.
We disable that for security.

However none of that should impact placement of the GA code into the theme, which is simply javascript inline — it’s not external js file — so none of that in my suggested htaccess code impacts that.

The theme has fixed layout, due to grid – you can’t make the main part of theme “wide” — that is what the “Newspaper” theme is for.

You can make the header “wide” by changing the header section — e.g., we use style 8 …

For the footer you can make it wide, via custom CSS ..

try this (what I use) —

.td-footer-container {
width: 100%;
}
.td-footer-container .td-pb-row {
width: 1021px;
margin: 0 auto;
}

If you can’t log in — go to your wp-content/ folder via FTP or filemanager on your hosting panel, and change name of plugins folder to xplugins, which will reset and decactivate them so you can at least login

That is part of WordPress core you’re using and not part of the theme; used to pull RSS feeds from other sources. You should deactivate your plugins other than Visual Composer to track down the “bad” plugin and/or remove any “RSS” widgets from your layout temporarily.

Yeah…. I guess having some kind of “related” stuff at bottom to click-over is best.

You might be able to use some “negative” spacing for the desktop viewport for that “block” … to simply add some custom CSS for that ?

Your Google+ shares will be appearing in Google SERPS once you “verify” your G+ “Page” is aligned with a specific website; so not entirely a waste. Much like “tweets” will start to appear in sidebar for relational trending content, so will G+ “shares” (+1s).

There is an issue where on “some” mobile devices the “#ttop” link doesn’t work — and I think that was the thinking on hiding that the first time around.