(I generally don’t turn off my plugins, since I’m updating my theme via FTP and the stuff I’m using doesn’t cause dbase writes/crashes if the theme being updated quickly via FTP)

I do upgrade via FTP; simply over-write existing theme folder with new one.
Over write existing plugins with new ones.

Your mileage may vary.

deactivate all plugins; clear any cache; turn off mod_pagespeed if being used

upload new files, new plugins,
turn on plugins. Done. 🙂

Author rank with rel=author is 100% dead. 🙂

The theme supports various schema.org markup, and the latest (brand new this week) version of YOAST SEO has whole bunch of added support for microformat data but I’ve not had a big block of time to dive into that in depth. It’s on my to do list, actually, for this coming week 🙂

Right now I’m in midst of playing with mod_spdy and a new wildcard SSL cert, and connecting that to mod_pagespeed correctly (waaaah).

And it’s good they are warning people, since any theme from prior to January, likely has the bad version (e.g., Newspaper 3.9.2 has the hackable version!). Also some themes on Themeforest and Envato (et al) have NOT been updated since January, and may be semi abandonware but are still being sold, with the bad version RIGHT NOW. So, they needed to do something about that issue, as people were buying themes and having their site(s) hacked pretty quick (another reason to use some form of comment removal to hide the versions of apps from your site header file!).

In fact, I know two themes got booted from my “purchase” line up of themes, which had not been updated in a long time, this month.

I tweeted about this, too and they tweeted back to clarify which versions were vulnerable. So, Themepunch has been on this pretty seriously. Similarly YOAST hired a security firm to audit their plugins, also. I think this may become a trend.

There are actually websites now which list all the current vulnerabilities in WordPress and plugins, which is very nice. I don’t check it all the time, but I do once in awhile out of curiosity.

eg

http://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-2337/product_id-4096/Wordpress-Wordpress.html

Or, subscribe to the SECURI Blog which usually catches stuff like the big flaw in ALL IN ONE SEO back in May.
http://blog.sucuri.net/category/wordpress

XMLRPC is often an issue which is why I do things to disable it.

But security is a whole different discussion. 🙂

Heh. I actually skip every couple of updates and then do my list of minor hacks; not really much of a way around it. Also notable is that you don’t have to update unless it’s for a security patch, resolved feature issue, bugfix, new feature, etc.

Usually what I do, vs using child themes, is keep a cheat sheet, much like you are doing in your list above, and then open my cheat folder, and my new version folder side by side, then go through each item and modify the new version for my fixes to keep them.

Tedious, but once you have your site the way you want it, you don’t need to get crazy about “oh no! there’s a new update!” — if your site WORKS, in some cases no reason to update every day. I have a site with Woo Canvas, and I skip every 5 updates until I see a need to do so, or if it fixes some wonky responsive issue. Site works, big whoop if they updated it last week.

Often you can look at the “what is new” summary, and decide if that works for you.

I skipped the 4.22 update, and 4.3 and will update on 4.3.1 of Newspaper. But that’s me.

You can use a child theme, just remember for some CSS and javascript things you may find a gremlin which you cannot track down for any specific reason other than you are basically running two themes at same time.

Another benefit of using ONE main theme, is you can also more readily optimize your wp-config.php file to include direct paths to your folders and know they will always work.

This was covered here on the forum recently. I actually spoke to the folks who make Revolution Slider, and the product was patched 29 versions ago. Meaning, RS 4.12 technically. All versions after that were patched.

So, if you have the current theme update 4.2 or later which includes RS Version 4.3.8 SkyWood (27th April 2014), you don’t need to worry about it. Good reason to keep your theme updated, or download the latest plugins which are bundled with each theme update.

SEE:
https://forum.tagdiv.com/topic/hacking-issues-with-rev-slider/

tables are not responsive in normal HTML, nor in themes based on Bootstrap 2.

Bootstrap 3 introduces a class for responsive tables which basically puts a pseudo iframe on the table so that when it gets too narrow to collapse any further, it adds a slider so somebody can slide to the right to see the whole table.

There is some custom code to do this with Bootstrap 2, which one of my guys came up with, and we use on our main business site (not running WP, but based on Bootstrap 2), and works, but have not tried to clone that to a WP site (yet).

Suggestion: if you were expert at code, you could likely copy the table elements from the Bootstrap 3 CSS and add to your styles CSS at bottom, then “try” using those new classes for your post to see if they work or not.

I am not sure if the new table classes from BS3 are in this theme or not, so Marius or Lucian would need to say yay or nay on this.

However, even then the class requires a custom hack for pesky Firefox which somehow continues to be less compatible with the “new web” lately than IE11 or Chrome.

But some anecdotal info here:
http://getbootstrap.com/css/#tables

You will need to upload new “clean” version of functions.php file via FTP to replace the bad version.

nice 🙂

Well, on my site I have it set to upscale proportionally…. so everything goes “up” in scale properly. It makes larger images to scale, it doesn’t stretch them in only one direction. You may need to “regenerate thumbnails” once you install the plugin. I use it on numerous websites both with and without the Newspaper theme, works flawlessly.

You may have to se the “crop image” function in the Newspaper theme panel.

They treat it as any markup on your page, but they are officially moving on to full support for the structured markeup, schema.org data, vs their own elements. So, it doesn’t hurt to leave it, but theme devs and YOAST SEO are removing any support for rel=author as it has no benefit for SEO, doesn’t point to anything, and signals between your G+ and blog have no functional value.

It has no impact on Google News, which is why that has also been removed from Google News results (we’ve been in GN since it launched a decade ago as beta). It won’t hurt you, but Google no longer captures the information at all so it’s kind of like the Dublin core tags of old, doesn’t hurt, since you can make any kind of meta tag you want to, but the rel=author is 100% dead as far as Google is concerned.

Here is the official blog post from Google on end of authorship support.

Again, Google has officially stated that rel=author is no longer supported for ANYTHING.

Original announcement of end of support:
https://plus.google.com/+JohnMueller/posts/HZf3KDP1Dm8

FYI to new and existing Newspaper users; Radu and co have removed rel=author support from the latest version of the theme as of 9/12/14. This is intentional and not an error.

Google no longer has ANY support for rel=author, as they have 100% abandoned any support for it at all.

Nothing to do with theme; but the sync does sometimes take longer if there is a major event happening which overloads their system a bit.

On our sites, if somebody posts a comment it usually shows up within 10 minutes on the page at most.

First time sync up normally takes a few hours and they email you to say when it’s done.

Usually if you have an issue, it’s best to run through all the settings for the plugin from the WordPress admin panel, and then on the Disqus site for your account.

Hi, the documentation is a great place to start
https://forum.tagdiv.com/newspaper-documentation/

There is a plugin I use for this, which works really well
“Thumbnail Upscale”
https://wordpress.org/plugins/thumbnail-upscale/

Google discontinued all support for the rel=author tag; it no longer is used for any ranking signals. All SEO folks, including the YOAST SEO plugin have begun removing any/all support for it.

See:
https://forum.tagdiv.com/topic/end-of-google-relauthor-function-end-of-life-for-function/

Categories and sub-categories are powered by wordpress not the theme.
http://codex.wordpress.org/Posts_Categories_Screen

Exactly! A lot of theme developers work this way by including a “bundled” version vs making you go buy a copy, but the the new version adds some wonky thing which might break the theme. So, this is a good way to do it, but kind of annoying at times, if you’re easily annoyed by the “updates available” notice in the WP login screen 🙂

At least WP stopped the stupid email thing they had for a few versions … “email: you have updates available; I tried updating, but it didn’t work …” …. automatic updates not a great thing, in my book. (I turn them off in my wp-config.php file, actually.)

I think there have actually been more problems with YOAST SEO than any other plugin in recent memory. Three updates in one day sometimes … x1, x2 (OOPS DON”T USE IT), then x3 to fix the messup in x1 they didn’t fix right in x2, all in one day. Upshot: never install the new version of YOAST unless it’s to fix long standing bugs, as they often have a panic fix later on.

Sorry … didn’t mean to editorialize so much … 🙂

You might want to read the documentation. The plugin is a “bundled version” which is included with the theme. It is updated when the theme is updated, to ensure the theme is compatible with new version. Generally speaking there are no new features in the latest dot revision not showcased in the theme demo on themeforest, so you’re not “losing anything” by waiting for a fully tested update that won’t break your website.

You may wish to peruse the theme docs, note link top right of this forum “documentation” and this page specifically:
https://forum.tagdiv.com/update-the-visual-composer-plugin-wpbakery/

Hope that helps 🙂

Most annoying thing for me with BS3, is the fact with “mobile first” approach (their term, not mine), is that when pages reduced to iPad retina portrait, the presumption is “no sidebar” which I find necessary for a lot of things like, oh, a newspaper site. A lot of BS3 devs just run with that, and annoying as heck on iPad for me.

Damn, need to get back to work now 🙂

One note is that while using AdSense for testing PageSpeed Insights lowers your score, that is the tested score, not the actual score for ranking signals, which discounts the advertising from their own network in calculating the speed for their purposes.

Put another way, Google doesn’t really lower your ranking based on speed for loading their own content on your site, as related to their ad system(s).

So, test with AdSense OFF, but you can then switch ads on, but choose text ads vs image ads (in your AdSense account), to derive minimal revenue from your site effort (neccessary for most bloggers and newspaper/magazine sites). Additionally, using only two ads vs 3, does help with overall user experience.

And you know I meant to also say … really good question!!

I know lot of folks stuck on IE8 because they got that with Win7, didn’t update to IE9, and now when they try the IE10/11 upgrader/updater it crashes and they have to roll back. (ahem, my mom…. finally got her to use Chrome v37!)

But yeah, IE11 is pretty nice. But BS3 takes the “mobile first, damn the old folks” approach, which I admire, but not practical for a lot of people “yet.”

Anybody still using IE6 needs to join the future! 🙂

• This reply was modified 11 years by simchris.

@rockcityrecord
glad you got it sorted! 🙂

@Steven
LOL right back 🙂 Well, if he can’t check the box, he might not know how to install a plugin 😉 (no insult intended to @rockcityrecord).

Comments are turned on/off from the main WP admin panel under “discussion” … and if turned “on” the comments will work, unless you have a plugin that conflicts with the theme’s normal comment file. You can also look in your WP admin under “comments” to see all the comments left for your site, which have nothing to do with theme.

Also in theme panel, under post settings, make sure the “disable comments sitewide” is not switched to “on.” Default is off, and would only be “on” (to turn comments OFF), if you selected it.

Not sure that helps, but maybe starting point to debug.

• This reply was modified 11 years by simchris.