herb miller

WordPress plugin specialist

Fizzie – an experimental Full Site Editing theme

Phase 2 of the development of the Gutenberg block editor introduces Full Site Editing ( FSE ). In order to document the 23 new blocks, I felt I had to embrace Full Site Editing and develop my own experimental theme, which I chose to call Fizzie. The requirements of Fizzie are:

  1. Implement Full Site Editing.
  2. Same look and feel as the Genesis-a2z theme.
  3. Support documentation / demonstration of each of the new blocks in Gutenberg.
  4. Find out what bits are missing from and/or not working on Gutenberg.
  5. Implement on blocks.wp-a2z.org, when stable.
What is Full Site Editing?

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Categories: WordPress

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How to survive WordPress 5.5’s removal of jQuery-migrate

I started upgrading to WordPress 5.5 and soon began to experience a load of problems with core functionality. Things that should work no longer worked. I first noticed it on a client’s site when Media Library didn’t display anything.

Media Library not working in WordPress 5.5.

WordPress TRAC Issue #50993

This post summarises my investigations, some of the problems I encountered, the workaround and some notes about what I need to do in the future, which is a work in progress.

TL;DR – 25th August 2020

As far as team Yoast are concerned the problem should go away if I upgrade to WordPress SEO v14.8.1.

Fixes a bug in WordPress itself where script concatenation was causing JavaScript errors, which in turn led to Yoast SEO malfunctioning. This bug was introduced in WordPress 5.5. We’re fixing it by disabling script concatenation entirely.

from the WordPres SEO v14.8.1 readme.txt file

With their fix being a workaround. Roll on WordPress 5.5.1

TL;DR – previous update

The problems that I documented last week were either due to a bug in WordPress or a bug in the Gutenberg plugin. There were two TRAC issues, and the problem had already been reported in Yoast’s GitHub repo.

The problem originally occurred with Gutenberg 8.7.1, WordPress SEO 14.7 and WordPress 5.5.

It appears that Gutenberg 8.8.0 has fixed the problem. There’s no longer a need to apply the patch developed for TRAC ticket #50999, nor, it seems, do I need the Enable jQuery Migrate Helper plugin.

The “what I need to do in the future” part is still a work in progress”. I’ve created a GitHub Project for it.

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SB Children block – my first Single Block plugin

Today I delivered my first Single Block ( SB ) plugin to wordpress.org. It’s called SB Children block and it’s in the Block Directory.

I’ve written up some notes about the plugin. Suffice it to say there were a few challenges along the way. But I’ve left the details of these in the GitHub issues.

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Horizontally scrolling tables on narrow devices

I’ve been looking at how to enable horizontal scrolling on tables created by the [bw_table] shortcode, when the device width is narrow. I want to be able to do it using CSS, without JavaScript. I also want to be able to style the table in the native Gutenberg blocks.

Having looked at a couple of solutions, I believe I’ll be able to achieve it having the table nested in a Group block, and providing the CSS styling using my CSS block.

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oik-clone v2.0.0-beta-20200616 – cloning new content made easier

Today, after many months of procrastination, I’ve implemented a small change to my oik-clone plugin that should significantly improve my publishing process. oik-clone now has the ability to automatically re-clone content with newly added (uncloned) featured images.

The primary purpose is to ensure that the target system has the correct ID for the featured image.

Original processNew process
Create the content.Same
Upload and attach the featured image.Same
View the content.Same
In the output of the [clone] shortcode select the post and the child attachment to clone. Click on cloneSame.
Edit the content – check the SEO meta description, correct a typo or something, update the taxonomies then update.No need to edit. You’re done.
View the content again.
Clone the content again.
Original process vs New process for cloning new content

See bobbingwide/oik-clone#50.

Clone/cloned output before cloning

Post without a featured image. Note: post ID 50 was extracted from the github shortcode. It’s a red herring I’ve learnt to live with.

Clone/cloned output after cloning

How to remove /blog/ from WordPress Multi Site permalink structure

If you’ve ever converted a single installation of WordPress into a WordPress Multi Site ( WPMS ) network using subdirectories, you’ll have noticed that the prefix for blog permalinks for the primary site changes from https://example.com/
to
https://example.com/blog/

If you are concerned that this new permalink structure will cause problems in the future then you may choose to remove the blog/ part.

It is possible to remove this prefix

  • Login as a Super Admin
  • Go to Network Admin -> Sites
  • Choose the Main site and click on Edit.
  • Choose the Settings tab
  • Find the Permalink Structure text field.
  • Remove the /blog text, leaving /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/
  • Scroll to the bottom and Save Changes.

Why would you want to do this?

  • So that permalinks for blog posts remain unchanged.
  • Because you think it would be better for SEO.
  • To prevent broken links.

Caveats

Some people say that making this change is not recommended. The reason for adding the blog/ prefix is to prevent conflicts with URLs in other sites in the network.

If you do this on the main site of your network, you must make sure that none of your posts, categories, tags, or custom post types and taxonomies have a slug equal to the slug of a subsite.

I did this on a local install, creating a subsite called 2020. Then I forgot about it, updated to WordPress 5.5-beta3 and thought the hack had stopped working. I’m going to have to fiddle with the new sub-site’s name now.

WordPress is old

WordPress was first released on 27th May 2003. It reached 17 years old on 27th May 2020. It’s rather popular you know. Here are a few of WordPress’s significant events from 2003 to the current day.

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Categories: WordPress

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Dynamic content block in oik-blocks v0.4.0-beta-20200209

I’m away on vacation very soon. I’ve taken the opportunity to release another beta version of my oik-blocks plugin with a new block called Dynamic content block ( oik/content-block ).

This block implements 11 of my dynamic content shortcodes delivered by the oik base plugin, hence the prefix. When it’s ready for production then I’ll deliver the block in oik v4.1.0.

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Tide times from tidetimes.co.uk

Tide Times & Heights for Northney on Tuesday, 01 December 2020
Low Tide: 04:55 ( 1.00m )
High Tide: 12:03 ( 4.60m )
Low Tide: 17:14 ( 0.90m )

Tide times from tidetimes.org.uk

Tide Times & Heights for Northney on 1st December 2020
04:55 - Low Tide ( 1.03m )
12:03 - High Tide ( 4.58m )
17:14 - Low Tide ( 0.91m )

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