\nNathan Ingram opens his virtual office doors during this informal, unstructured webinar to answer your questions. There is no agenda and no planned content. Bring your questions and Nathan will answer them first come, first served. Get your answers and learn from the questions of others.\n\n\n\nRegister once for all Office Hours from January through March 2024.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n","EventOrganizerNames":"Nathan Ingram","inline_featured_image":"","livestream_public":1,"is_multi-day_event":0,"livestream_zoom_registration_link":"https:\/\/us06web.zoom.us\/webinar\/register\/WN_TYZ2jiAIT1-ucQsW_ZfkHg","livestream_replay_set":0,"livestream_chat_log":"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1PP_FSn1JJ-K7i6duemTnJ8HtFkerJmBB\/view?usp=sharing","livestream_live_transcript_url":"https:\/\/otter.ai\/u\/EepVA_AOk6e-TkyxegbZ7EeuCWo?utm_source=copy_url","livestream_vimeo_video_id":908813396,"livestream_live_transcript_text":"Happy Thursday\r\n\r\nwe're not having fun yet Office Hours hasn't started yet\r\n\r\nAll right, captions should be working for everybody if you want those All right, welcome. Welcome, everybody. We are about a minute away from getting started\r\n\r\nmany, many many questions in queue already today\r\n\r\nmany questions\r\n\r\nand the promise demo of moving orders and such from one WooCommerce to another.\r\n\r\nIf you have a question to ask you better get it in now. Because we have many, many questions in queue. Link is there. I'm not sure we'll be able to get to all these today. We will do our best I do have a hard stop. I have got to be gone by five minutes after. Yes, yes. All right, everybody just about ready to start.\r\n\r\nOkay, I have three minutes after so we will begin\r\n\r\nwell, happy Thursday everybody. Its office hours here on solid Academy. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here at solid Academy. Glad you're all here with us today. We got lots of questions in queue. It has been like a landslide since the first of the year. So many questions. So so many questions, which is great. That's what we're here for. One thing just to note Can y'all help me with this? Let's try to let's try to only ask three questions apiece per office hours just to make sure everybody gets time to have their questions asked. And then at the toward the end. If we're running short then feel free to ask whatever you want. But just so we you know, get make sure everybody gets a good you know, a good opportunity to have their questions answered. Just kind of helped me with that, if you will, please. That would be wonderful. It's a great problem to have. Honestly, that's why we're here. This is what office hours is about. And so want to be as helpful as possible. Okay. Last week we talked about this process of using WP all Import Export WP all the things to move orders and users and that sort of stuff. Out of one WooCommerce site into a development site. And so we talked last week about Chris coming on and giving us a demo of that. So Chris, we're gonna promote Chris the panelist, Chris you've not ever been on video here. Have you? I think this is like the first deal. So y'all welcome the famous Chris Malone. who ought to be popping on here momentarily. You get to see Chris Yes, I think he's coming. Yeah, right. Exactly. Oh, Chris, are you there? Unable to start video. That's not good. Hang on. Maybe there's something I have to allow on this side. Analysts\r\n\r\nyour host has stopped video. All right. I'm gonna change you to huh. Okay, but you can talk right Chris? Can you hear me? Yeah, we can hear you. Can everybody hear Chris? This is weird. I wonder what's the deal? Oh, wait, you know what, I think I know what it is. And I don't know that I can change that setting. Once we've started. Yeah, I don't think I can change it after we started. So you will see Chris very soon and a webinar showing up\r\n\r\nthis month. I can't share my screen either. Oh, you can't see.\r\n\r\nThis might be complicated. Okay, let's do this. I could talk\r\n\r\nyou through it without any visuals or anything. It would be great.\r\n\r\nThat'll think that's good. All right. I'm gonna try to not okay, wait, here we go multiple. Okay. So, Chris, you should be able to share now Yes, I\r\n\r\ncan.\r\n\r\nReally should have practiced this beforehand, but it's not usually this\r\n\r\ndifficult. I hinted. At that, but then\r\n\r\nI promptly ignored it. Probably\r\n\r\nnot okay. So, Nathan said I could have two minutes to explain this.\r\n\r\nI take all the time you need\r\n\r\nso the products that we need to do this are obviously WP all import pro when the WP all import users module and WP all import WooCommerce add on and then we need the same things with WP all export. So this is their basically their pricing you can get everything they have for 399 one time purchase. We we have a different level because we bought it a long time ago but that even if we had to buy it today $400 For what this does, is a no brainer.\r\n\r\nThere's project to use this on here.\r\n\r\nOkay, so I've got two websites here. We have a shop. This is our current shop and then we have our brand new shop. So we want to get three things over to the new shop. We want to get our products. We want to get our customers and we want to get our orders and we need to do those things in that order. It's a really important order to do things in. So I've already got the exports made but I'll just show you real quick. It's actually a pretty fast process. This is on the old site. We're going to go to create a new export and because we have the WooCommerce module, we get these great options right here. So we're going to do our products. And then we have some options. We have a site we're about to work on that has. I don't remember Nathan 17,000 orders or something like that. And many it goes back to 2000 customers so there are times you might want to filter. You can filter by any of these normal WordPress type things, and WooCommerce fields. And if you have custom fields, those would still appear to if you have like a custom post type or know you've added custom fields to the WooCommerce post type that would also fit here. We're just going to do a plain ol let's migrate everything we hit migrate products. These are some settings that are that can be important. We use this one a lot only export products. That have been modified since the last export. Other than that, you can you can figure all these out. They're useful for different reasons, but that really goes beyond what we're doing today. You can name the export file wherever you want, and then you just hit export. And it's really fast. And now we're given some options. We can generate a secure URL, and that generates a URL to the CSV file. If you need to give that to somebody else. Then Then we have the option to download. If you download CSV, all you're gonna get is a an Excel CSV file that has all your products useful. But if you download bundle, which is what we're going to do, you get that CSV file plus you get a configuration file that map's all the fields, and you're going to see why that's important in just a second. So we're going to download the bundle already done. And then we would do the same thing with our with our want to fast Yeah, we don't want we would do the same thing. For WooCommerce customers and WooCommerce orders. I will show you that because it is exactly the same process. I will show you 111 Little thing though. If we go to do our orders should have 100 and something if you want to if you don't want everything to be in the export and you don't want to import everything you can customize the export file by clicking this. And what it gives you are the three These are like the required things because it uses this to to know if the file if the product or customer order already exists on the new site where you're importing. But other than that you can choose anything you want to import. So if you're like if you wanted to just update something, you could choose just that data point and not and not bring everything into the import and you can as you can see you can there's everything is choosable and you just drag it over and it adds it to your to your export file. But we're not going to do that. And now we're gonna go to our new site\r\n\r\nsee if I got all that stuff. Yeah, so we're gonna go to our new site and we're gonna go to WP all import new import.\r\n\r\nSo remember, it's important to do your products first and then your customers and then your orders. If you do orders first before everything the products aren't there and it will just fail. If you do orders before your customers, even if the products are there. It won't be tied to your customers. It'll create like a guest customer and that really messes everything up. So you don't want to do that. So here's some options we have on our import. Now this is the new site that we're importing into. So when we go to Import, we can use a file that's already that's already been uploaded. And you'll see I have some here. And there are reasons you would do that. You can download a file so if I had that link that I showed you a second ago I could stick that right here. Also, what I can put here is an XML a link to an XML file. So if you want to manage your inventory from an XML file, you can put that link right here and then later in the process, we schedule the import. So like daily if you're like if you have a business that's online and offline, and your inventory is managed, in a spreadsheet somewhere, this will keep your online inventory accurate. Because there's no way to yes Nathan I see that.\r\n\r\nI didn't know you could do that. That's Oh,\r\n\r\nit's really cool. Yeah. And you can do that with any of the data points. It's not just orders or inventory or you can do it with anything. So it can be your customer base, your customer list, everything. Anything you can import you can import via an XML file. So pretty cool. But we're going to upload a file and remember we're gonna do our products first. I'm gonna get the one I did earlier today. That will be probably this one and opens right up. Now we can do new items, which is what we're going to do or we can do existing items. If I choose existing my existing items. Even if there's a new product in my Excel file, it will not add the product. There are reasons you would want to do that sometimes but we we want to do new items. And it's a product and it knows all this because of this configuration file. Okay? If we didn't have the configuration file, we would have to choose what kind of product it is. You would still have to have the add on though for WooCommerce. You cannot import anything into WooCommerce without the add on. All right, this just shows you what's in the file. It's like an example. It's our number one of 12 and it's everything that it's importing. And we're going to continue now this is where you see why it's important to have that config file. Because every every one of these data points it's our it already knows what to put where from the CSV file if we didn't have that config file. And for all transparency, I didn't know what the bundle was the first couple of times I did this and I went one by one and matched all these files because I was I just didn't know. So I'm telling you so you don't have to make my mistake. Images. It's going to pull in the images. It's going to download them from where they are and upload them into your media library automatically. If there's more than one image, it's going to know that and it's going to get them it does variations it does. It's everything in your WooCommerce products. It's going to get all of it and it's going to put it in your new site. So we are just going to I do want to tell you about this function editor. If when we when we migrate it to Academy for solid WP, we had in our old our old events, we had a bunch of HTML in the content area which for that site, we had to do that because we just did it was an old site. But we didn't want that in the new site because then then you have no control over font sizes or colors or anything like that. So what we did what we ended up doing after I figured out there was a way to do this is to check GPT and said hey, I've got this content, it's in the whatever, whatever the block is, I want to scrub all the HTML except for heading tags is what we ended up doing. You pop that little function right in here. And during the import, it's going to it's going to get rid of all of that. And so you don't have to go item by item and clean out your your your content the like the the part of the product where you're putting your description, so very handy and all kinds of all kinds of places. We're going to get rid of that. And we're going to just continue to step forward because we know it has already mapped all the fields. Right here we can create new products which is what we want to do. And if you've selected previous slides, we we know the products might be there. You would also want to do update existing and then it's going to update any data that's changed. If you unclick this, it's not going to create anything new it would only update and if and vice versa. Talk about why that is. Yeah, it's very important. And something really good to know is if you want to just update existing products, you can choose which data to update. So if you are let's say you've already imported everything and the customer on their old side, they've updated their inventory. And you got to get new inventory numbers into your new site. Well, you could go one by one but we've we migrated a couple of sites back in the summer that were there were 1000s and 1000s and 1000s of products and they updated their inventory rightfully so, during the migration product process. So we needed to come back here and just update the inventory. The site was basically done and this was our last step. That's it this is how you do it. Choose which data to update and you choose the appropriate the appropriate you know thingy the appropriate checkbox. There's also a custom fields which is what is that's how you do things like inventory. You can find all these codes, just do a search online, go to the WP all import documentation. You can find all of that there. So we're not going to dig into that today. This is important that if you're using the mapping, it's going to pull this in automatically. It's how it matches things, items on the new site. And so it's going to use the ID we're just going to hit continue and it's going to go here one last chance to change your mind we're going to confirm and run import. This does take a bit of time on the site. I talked to you about that we have 17,000 orders it took about an hour to export and import. So that's two hours but as you can see,\r\n\r\nthat was really fast. So if you're manually handling 17,000 things\r\n\r\nOh true. Yeah. No contest.\r\n\r\nYeah. Fast hosting.\r\n\r\nYeah. Yeah. So here's our here Here are our, our, our our items, our products, they're all there. So we're gonna breeze through really fast these other two things here. We're gonna do a new report actually don't need to do customers. Because I did that earlier. And I didn't delete them, but I'll just do it for funsies. So you see that it's not going to duplicate them. It's just going to update them. And what's going to happen is it's going to skip these two because it's going to see that they already exist. Come on let's get there let's just do it\r\n\r\ngonna see that they already exist and it's going to skip them a really handy thing about WP all import export is you see every single thing that it does, you see every time it checks a field for every single item, which is is very useful if something breaks down. So nothing to see there today. But if something was not working, right, you can come here and debug it. And I have figured that out oh I got the name. I use the hyphen instead of underscore in a in a field name or something. So we skipped as I said, Let's do one more import and this is products. This is orders. So something really important. When you import orders. It is going to act like the order has just been placed. That means two things all of your customers are going to get an email that they've their order has been placed successfully. All of your admins or shop managers are going to get an email Nathan, that says congratulations, whatever you happen to order, and they think got a whole bunch of emails this morning because I didn't do what I'm about to tell you never forget to do because I forgot.\r\n\r\nSo number one is our hacking. Yeah.\r\n\r\nOh, and I changed the password and he's like, did you change the password on WP Nathan? And did you place a bunch of orders? So two very important things. We want to turn off inventory tracking. So we're going to go to WooCommerce settings and we want to go to products and we want to go to inventory. And we want to turn off uncheck Enable stock\r\n\r\nmanagement. Now why are we doing that? If\r\n\r\nyou don't do this, when you bring in all these orders is going to change the inventory of your products. Now the problem is we exported the products with the inventory set to levels based on the orders that had been made. So if we put the orders through again, it's going to decrease the inventory. You don't need to ask me how I know this happens. But it does.\r\n\r\nYeah, we you may have learned that the hard way right.\r\n\r\nI may have learned it the really hard way because it is really hard to fix it. So we're gonna we did that. Now. I'm going to show you let's go to orders get this going. Because there's 106 I think, take a little longer almost done Nathan. Continue. Oh, that was faster than I thought. Oh no, we haven't got to the Import yet. So when we get to step four there is this little option which says blog email notifications during import work. It sometimes works, but it doesn't always so what we ended up doing was was putting disabled emails on the plugin disable emails on the site that you're importing into. And I would say Never trust this. Because you know, we're just playing around today and it was funny that Nathan got 40 emails that all these new orders, but it was funny, but that is funny because that is egg on your face and it really should. It's n plus all this customers get an order. Notice and then they contact your client and say Hey, I didn't place this order. So just put unblock email or disable emails plugin and that'll save you all that heartache. We're gonna hit continue and then we're done.\r\n\r\nI just dropped in the link for disable emails. We talked about that plug in quite a bit here but that's a really really good one that it just stops the WordPress site from sending any email at all period.\r\n\r\nSo important when you're doing this. Of course when you're through importing, you don't want to forget to turn back on enable stock management 23 counted up together.\r\n\r\nInsert Jeopardy thing here. Yeah,\r\n\r\nI can actually just show you. We don't have to see all those orders come through but where did that open? Third tab somewhere. I don't know what my Zoom stuff is up at the top so I can't see anything. Okay, so here's all of our orders. And it I mean, it's it's just all there. So you'll see Jane and John Jane Doe, John Doe, John Smith. We use the plug in what's the name of that plugin, generate fake orders or something? Yeah, something like that to generate 100 orders. And of course Nathan thought he had hit the jackpot with them up Nathan.\r\n\r\nOh, I got like 100 and something $1,000 worth of sales yesterday. It was wonderful.\r\n\r\nYeah, it was a great day on web, Nathan. So yeah, that's all there is. If you make a mistake. I should have prefaced this but I guess I assumed before you do any of this, make a backup and then make another backup and make a database backup. So you have lots of backups because you may need them. But if you have made a mistake here and don't like if all the orders something happened or I don't know you can go and delete all the orders and re import them without restoring a backup. Same with products. But if you mess up with your customers, there's really not a clean way to get rid of them because it's tied into the users. And it's not a clean way to do that. So you do want to have backup to backups, I would say and then also a database backup just in case especially if it's an actual client. So anyway, that's it. I don't know if there's any questions, or if I can answer them if there are but\r\n\r\nyeah, very good. Great demo, Chris. Really appreciate that. And that came about everybody of course last week, just in the discussion of how do you get you know what do you how do you deal with migrating a an existing rebuilding an existing transactional site like an email or a ecommerce site or a membership site, or some site on which users are doing things it needs to keep track? So the EPL import export is really the best way there's a number of others out there that tried to keep sites in sync, but they're all kind of fiddly. I've never had great results with any of them. And WP all Import Export really solves that whole problem. So they've\r\n\r\ngot a great documentation area with great videos. There's so much out there you can do and you can do pretty much anything you can move pretty much any data that's in the in the database. So\r\n\r\nyeah, very good. Couple of questions that popped up melt. Melanie says she's never exported variations and so it does product variations.\r\n\r\nIt does the site that I'm in the couple of sites that we did over the summer, they all have variations and they all and that's what I was learning to do it and I was trying to do the variations by dragging the the field names in and everything but with the bundle it just all it just all works. It gets the images in the right place everything.\r\n\r\nYeah, great and also what about order ID conflicts when the IDs are different between the source and target site? What does it do?\r\n\r\nAs long as you are using the bundle the field mapping it keeps it all together. We we that we did actually experiment with a way to keep the user ID the same. We were not successful in doing that. But if you're using that bundle, where it's mapping everything based on what it knows it exported, it keeps everything tied\r\n\r\ntogether. Yeah. Good. All right, Chris. That's awesome. And folks, Chris will be back and you be able to see his face. Here on February the 13th. Chris is going to be doing everything he's learned about supporting my crazy customers in our agency. Not everything on the internet.\r\n\r\nNot everything Nathan it's a family show.\r\n\r\nThat's true. Yeah, we will we'll keep this PG rated Yes. So that's coming up on February 13. So make sure you're registered for that one. Chris. Thanks, man. Appreciate it. Everybody say thank you to Chris. You're welcome. And we will move right back into some questions here. All right. We have many many questions in queue. One other thing I do want to point out, David Johnson, who is the product owner for the new product owner for solid WP, he's the one that interfaces with humans and developers. Can I say that? Is that right? Human speak versus developer speak, to build really cool things for everybody. David is here in the audience today. Everybody say hi to David. We'll have him on next week. So you folks can meet him and hear a little bit about what his thoughts are for moving moving forward with solid WP. Also, let me just note this, the WooCommerce bootcamp was scheduled for Tuesday, Wednesday of this week and as hopefully you all got notice of our presenter the day I've woke up with sick with no voice. And so we're going to look at like a pro. I think rescheduling that just as soon as we have a slot and we can coordinate with Zack schedule, we'll get that back on the books. Okay, let us get going with some questions. Our list begins with Chris. Oh, Chris, you said I could skip this question that was leftover from last week Right? I believe. Alrighty, so next up then is class. Right class. All righty, so a rescue site using paid membership pro the free plan and stripe to manage memberships. Question number one at some point strike that disconnected and the people managing the site then connected to a different Stripe account? Of course they did. The problem is now some subscriptions are active through the old stripe, but of course current data doesn't show up and paid memberships Pro. Oh my goodness. The client wants to find a way to bring that missing data into the website so customers can log in and update their info. Do you know of any way to do that without actually reconnecting the old Stripe account? Okay, yes. So does Class A you can skip the party. Okay, well, I'll just say this for other people who might have this issue. Stripe is really good about helping you connect to stripe accounts. You'll have to deal with their internal team. There's no way to do this in the UI. But if they have access to both and can validate that they can just explain to the stripe support team what happened and often the often they can move customers into one account from the other. Also, if you want to break up and account into two they can do that as well. So they're they're pretty good about that. Of course we pay them a fortune. So you know, it's like they're doing something with that. Oh, yeah. Question number two. When the site is rebuilt subscriptions will be handled through in stripe, which raises the issue of how to handle the transfer old subscription and paid memberships pro needs to be transferred to WooCommerce and stripe. So class, are you talking about the WooCommerce membership slash subscriptions plugins? Is that what you're going to use the actual core? Okay, so I haven't used I've used the WooCommerce memberships plug in or subscriptions plug in like once a long time ago, but I think what here's the deal, if you can go in like you can and paid memberships Pro and restrict content Pro and you can add or change the subscription ID it'll be su B underscore long string of characters and there's also a customer ID like Cu S underscore a bunch of stuff. Those two IDs. If you can move those to that subscription, it will still work like you can connect. That's how you connect it with the customer ID and the subscription ID. Yeah, so they shouldn't like you. You can continue. You should be able to move it over. It's not going to be easy, but it's potentially possible. Does that make sense? Class get any follow up on that you're good to go. There's nothing more fun than changing the payment processor and or platform managing memberships. There's just a lot of detail work. Yeah, all right. Next up is Manu on new All right. I've been receiving email alert on old Sites found on hosting account okay, how do you update a subdomain for a sub domain or how just to outright delete the subdomain without affecting the main domain? Okay, I'm not exactly sure what you're asking here minute. But what this this is I'm assuming this isn't a warning from solid security, letting you know that it found a WordPress install because that's one of the options that solid security will do scan the hosting account for older add or out of date WordPress installs and that's good because sometimes we make a staging site or whatever subdomain we forget about it. And now it's eight versions of WordPress past. I wouldn't you know, I'm sure none of you would ever do something like that. But I've actually done that. Anyhow, what you need to do is go in and if you don't, this is telling me where it's located in your public html folder. version six to two. You should just be able to go in there and delete it. If you don't need that subdomain anymore, then just delete it. And you can do that in your cPanel File Manager or whatever file management option your hosting platform has. So yeah, just delete it. If you still need it. Then you'd need to log in to this WordPress install and run updates just like on any other Yeah. All make sure the main site is not getting any images that yes, so if there's any usage at all of this, this subdomain this fork it's fork of the site probably make sure that it's not being used obviously before you delete it. Yeah, good.\r\n\r\nAlrighty. Next up also Manu.\r\n\r\nOkay, all right. File change warnings. This is something again from solid security. It found a bunch of file changes. Okay, so ultimately the question is, what should I be looking for when the website is working fine. The question is, how do you know if the website is working fine. So the point of the file change notification is oftentimes when a site gets infected, the hacker or bad actor will insert new files or they'll inject code into certain files. And so if the size of the file has changed, or the date or anything like that, this file change scan will let you know that. What you're seeing here though, is one of the downsides of the file change notification, which is something like if you run WordPress updates that's going to change your files and so you get file change notifications. So this is why I suggest one of two things. The safest option is make sure that you run your updates at the same time every week. You have heard me say that forever. Consistency, consistency consistency, that way, you know, hey, I've run all my WordPress updates on Wednesday afternoon for all my sites. So if you get a file change notification, and those files are changed in the window when you're running updates. You can pretty safely ignore that file change. But let's say you get a file change notice on a Sunday afternoon well that's kind of outside your window, right? So maybe that's when you should pay attention to it does that help? There's a purpose and a reason for these things, but there's really no way for solid security to know that this was a WordPress update versus otherwise. Unless somebody really smart can write some magic code, which would be awesome. Okay, next up is Paul.\r\n\r\nAwesome, Paul. Okay.\r\n\r\nIt is e c t o embarrassing confession time. Okay. Okay, so can we all agree we're not going to judge Paul for this next question. Okay. I look at the sites we have and I see a lot of sites still have the classic editor installed. Okay. Look, us too. I mean, who else has classic editor running on a lot of things? Oh, my goodness. I do many things. Okay, no problem. First of all, is it still okay to run this? Yeah, no, no problem there. It's easy enough to remove but what do I tell my clients at this point? Do I let them find out in a shocking way? If they go to write a blog post that they now have? This block editor? Do I have to offer training this is really, really good. Okay, so let's stop right there. Most of the sites on which we're still running classic editor are sites that were designed in a page builder. So you know if we got to Beaver Builder site, we generally turn off the block editor just because it's there gonna be in the in Beaver Builder either way, on posts. We've found that people actually like the block editor. It really opened my eyes and I think I've told this story before on office hours, but we built I built a site just as a retirement present for an old college professor of mine that's been a friend for years. And when he retired, he was thinking about writing something we were getting together for coffee and talking. I'm like, we're gonna put a blog together for you. You can share your stuff on the blog and this was the first site a few years ago that we actually allowed the client to use the block editor now this this person had never touched the classic editor. And he picked up the block editor like that it was he loves it never had a problem. And so it's really remarkable how quickly he took to it for blog posts. It's really quite good. It gets a little complicated when you're trying to do page design with the block editor. Let's face it, it just does. Kadence blocks is the best experience that you'll find it is the most page builder like experience in blocks. In my opinion. But when you're talking about blog posts, I found that clients just kind of jumped right into it, even the non technical ones. Yeah, so Stacy saying she had some clients who hated it. You know, it depends on what they're trying to do with the classic editor right? Once you show them how some of the things work. I've found that it's pretty easy to get them to move over. You can certainly do training, we bundle stills, video user manuals, that product in the back end that has all those block editor videos as well. So you know, is it going to cause a problem to keep it on there now? Is the is the classic editor getting really dated? Yes. And honestly, the block editor is a lot more capable. So it's nothing wrong with keeping it. Do you have to offer training? Not necessarily but maybe throw some videos in there. It's up to you All right. Next up is Aaron. Aaron. Are you here? Do not see Aaron in the audience, but we will endeavor to answer his question. All right, Aaron. It's a long one. Okay. I'm encountering an error message using backups to migrate a dev site to live both the dev and live or on the liquid web VPS error message pops up when the database is trying to be imported. The error message is quite long, but essentially says there's a JavaScript error. Interesting.\r\n\r\nThat my SQL I PHP extension.\r\n\r\nThat's interesting. All right.\r\n\r\nSo liquidweb says the PHP is in abled. Somehow it's being blocked when I tried to migrate the site. Also contacted solid backups. They gave me a few suggestions which haven't worked yet. One of the suggestions was delete the htaccess file, always delete the htaccess file on the on the target. Always do do that. person I work with was able to successfully migrate to their local server. It must be a problem with your server. I'm at a loss. Interesting. Okay, so the very first thing I would suggest here is make sure that your import buddy that you export it is not old. So many errors with solid backups happen because I saved an import buddy dot PHP to my desktop, you know six months ago, and I'm still using that one to drag and drop and whatever makes do a clean export of the import buddy file. See if that helps. Otherwise, that's really weird. I don't think I've ever seen Chris if we ever seen this error before, I don't think I've seen this one.\r\n\r\nThat is interesting.\r\n\r\nHas anybody anybody else on the call? Have you seen this? This This is a weird one. Aaron I would make sure the environment all matches up your PHP version, and so forth. The other thing I would check is if the PHP version that let me ask the let me say a different way. Make sure the extension is enabled on the PHP version. That's active on the target domain in that cPanel because it might be active on like PHP eight, but not php. 8.1 if you're using that, Paul is that is talking to is Could it be an a MySQL versus Maria database? Maybe? That shouldn't matter from source to target. But Maria, sometimes Maria does weird things. It just does.\r\n\r\nAh,\r\n\r\nokay, so Aaron, I don't know that I'm very much help to you. And that's we can't ask you follow up questions here. Try those. Try those things, especially first that import buddy, and then make sure the PHP versions are matching. And aside from that, man, I come back next week and let's talk more specifically where we can do back and forth q&a If you if you're able. So Wow. Sorry, we couldn't be of more help there. Aaron. Yeah, Paul, Paul is suggesting you could just move it manually. Other than you'd have to update the you just have to run a search replace on the database, you could move the files over, move the database over just dump it out of PHP myadmin. And then you'd have to run an SQL command to update the domain in the database, which is not terribly difficult to be honest but that GPT can give you the SQL query to run. Really, this should work and it's odd that it's not all right, next up is Manu. Manu Should I take any actions about this website constantly being login attempts blocked and banned. So here's a screenshot from the security dashboard of lots of threats blocked. And this one which is Yeah, blocked too many bad. Attempts. Yeah. Okay. These are these are bots hammering away at your WP login. Should I should you be replacing these IP addresses in Cloudflare? No, you'll be doing that the rest of your life that's not going to help you. Blocking individual IP addresses is not super helpful in this case. Are they taking hosting resources? Yes, they absolutely are. And it can slow down your website because bots are hammering away at your WP login. So one of two things needs to happen here. Manu is there. You say this is behind Cloudflare. Right? Do you are you running the Cloudflare WAF rule that puts a manage challenge in front of the login page. My guess is you're not because otherwise you probably wouldn't be seeing this traffic. So you're yeah so adding a WAF rule at the Cloudflare level that puts a managed challenge in front of your login page is the first step. The second thing and you can do this just right in solid security. Just make sure you put a CAPTCHA so go to Security and settings I'm on the captcha and you can choose from Google's reCAPTCHA or CloudFlare, turnstile or H captcha and put it right there on the lot. We'll just put it on all of it. But that CAPTCHA on that login page, and that way they can't submit the login form without passing the CAPTCHA so that's what that's what I would recommend. Oh, what is the Cloudflare rule? I can show you it real quick.\r\n\r\nI'm on.\r\n\r\nUri path contains WP login. That'll do it and just set it for a managed challenge. There's other things you could do on this rule. But this is basically it. minute you say you have Cloudflare turnstile, I'm not quite sure what you mean by that. You're using it in solid security. It's set for Cloudflare turnstile. Oh as a plugin. Then make sure it's showing up on if you have solid security you don't need Cloudflare turnstyle unless you have WooCommerce you can just use the Cloudflare turnstile right here and solid security oh the Cloudflare plugin that's different that doesn't do any security. The Cloudflare plugin for WordPress is about CDN caching. So set this up as a WAF rule, and that'll put before they even get to your site they'll have to pass a manage challenge. Okay, next up Oh awesome. Okay, how does using a service like postmark violate HIPAA requirements since a copy of the email is saved on the postmark site? Okay, insert disclaimer about me not being an attorney or expert on HIPAA matters, right? My understanding is if you're using so first of all, let me just say this You shouldn't be using any form that you're controlling the data flow of if any, HIPAA governed information is passing through that form, period. Okay. So let's say you have a gravity form and let's just say it's a simple contact form on a on a physician website. And if it's got a comment block where somebody could type Oh, I've got this illness or Oh, I did whatever any health information on there and that that's going into the WordPress that even if you're not asking about it, it can collect health info you can't do that. So it's better just to not, you need a hosted form solution really, for the most, the best HIPAA compliance to get that off your server. And so yes, if that information is passing through, Postmark, it's going to be a violation of HIPAA, as I understand it.\r\n\r\nOkay. All right. Don't do that. Do\r\n\r\nsomething like the JotForm HIPAA solution, which is very expensive, but it's just the cost of doing business. And that way, it's an embedded form you don't fool with the security, and it's on somebody else's back. All right, Chris is up next. Oh, not a question. Okie dokie. At some point recently, Gravity Forms added an active inactive button to all the forms on the site active inactive. Do you mean this little toggle that's been there for a little while. This right here, active inactive. You can click it and it makes it inactive. Yep. That's been there for a while. I noticed the other day and I didn't think much about it. Active status makes the old forms discoverable.\r\n\r\nAnd people can fill them out\r\n\r\ndiscoverable how\r\n\r\nChris, what do you mean by discus because they don't show up in the sitemap?\r\n\r\nThey were able to access the forms. They're not in the sitemap. They did a search and found them. Did they find a URL\r\n\r\nwith the form embedded on it?\r\n\r\nYeah, my guess my guess is they found a page on the site. That had the an old form embedded, maybe the page. Yeah, well, the issue it's always been like this is nothing new with Grameen. If the form is there and it's published. And the page still has an old form on it even if that page is taken out of the menu and live it's still probably showing up in the site sitemap and a form it's just form. It's there. Yeah, so it's, this is yeah, it's so it's a good practice. If you've got old forms, you don't want to delete you can just click that Active button it'll turn it inactive and it won't show up on the pages anymore. Better would be draft all those pages that contain the form in that as well. So this is really kind of a multi layered problem. The pages themselves probably shouldn't have been active anymore anyway. Yeah. All right. Next up, is Sue.\r\n\r\nOh, Sue, you're killing me. What did you and the others on this webinar do with the four hours you got back when the speaker had to cancel? I edited seven chapters of a book, built a homepage for a new client and knocked on popcorn. I did additional work. Yes, we got a couple of projects we're working on.\r\n\r\nFunny Oh, Sue. Okay. Next up Manu.\r\n\r\nAll right, I actually look at this one ahead of time. I don't typically do that with Office Hours questions because, you know, it's the thrill of not knowing what's going to happen. This one though. David Johnson if you're still watching, this one is curious. backup schedule. What is the difference between this? And this? Because I don't know the answer. All right. So we're here in the setting up of the schedule page on solid backups. In the go there. I backed myself in. Okay, anyway. And there's the weekly Yeah. But then there's this one, which is weekly with the it's SEC weekly thing here. So this is I think it's pulling from an action scheduler,\r\n\r\nbut it shouldn't do that.\r\n\r\nManu I would suggest that you send solid backups a support ticket with these screenshots. Okay, David just had this conversation so they're aware of it. Yeah, so it appears here that it's pulling from an action scheduler item that belongs to back a solid security interesting yeah, so this is a the the old I theme security database backup function, which was really poor. I was just a holdover from years past of the plugin being better work better WP Security. This is actually pulling it's showing one of the the action scheduler items from I think security so it'll go away. They're aware of it. Okie dokie. Next up, is let's see Doris. All right, Doris. Cloudflare. Setting up email forwards Is there a way to send the forward to more than one recipient I tried listing the emails with a comma but it gives me an error. If I set up three forwards using the same Forward address. So this is an organization wants one address to go to three committee members. That is an excellent question. I have not tried a worked forward\r\n\r\nthat's mine the wrong spot.\r\n\r\nOh, looky here. Is this new? Has anybody played with the demark management on Cloudflare? I don't recall seeing this until just this moment. I don't get in the email tab very much though. Interest Well, it's me it's everything says beta Cloudflare is as bad as Google on beta stuff. Okay. All right. So somebody by the way, fog flare, also as bad as Google about moving things around and renaming them Can I get an amen on that?\r\n\r\nOkay, so what?\r\n\r\nSomebody remind me where we go to set up email forwards and Cloudflare was I thought it was here. Destination dresses. There it is. Okay, right. Here. So here's destination, email. routing.\r\n\r\nYeah, that's what I thought. Okay, at a destination address.\r\n\r\nNow, this says you can create up to 200 destination addresses, but in the routing rule, okay, so you're what you're saying is, there's a here's a catch all address into an email and you got to pick one. Okay, but maybe what you can do is add multiple send an email to destination saying.\r\n\r\nInto a worker. Yeah, so it looks like in the UI you can only it's going to be a one to one. There may be another way to do this with workers, but that's going to be beyond the ability of me to explain it in this office hours. Oh, that's pretty cool. Interact with chat GPT from a Cloudflare worker. Very, very interesting. Okay. There's a lot of stuff here. It's going to be beyond my ability to get into it today though. Yep, so Doris, it looks like it's a one to one in the UI unless you use a worker, which gets fairly complicated. My advice to you would be if somebody needs to have an exploiter email address like this. This is not the way to do it. So it would need to you have to do something else to set that up. Yep. All righty, next up, and we answer five questions in about five minutes. Let's see. All right, Beth is next.\r\n\r\nAll right, the continuing\r\n\r\nsaga of the chemical chemistry professor online course. I need help. Implementing the paywalled content solution here\r\n\r\noh, gosh, okay.\r\n\r\nThere's so much I don't understand. I don't even know the questions to ask. I'm willing to pay for help on the client site. Okay. So this is a plea for help from Beth Livingston. So, if you would like to help Beth with this schema structured data, ping her in the solid slack group. That's a great spot for that. Beth, you are in the solid slack correct. And by the way, if you need anybody on office hours today, if you don't have an invite to solid slack, please let me know in the chat and I'll get you an invite. Okay, next up. Ah, class. All right class. Kadence shouting CSS issue Kadence. website with a child theme. Most styling is in the child theme style that CSS. A few lines of CSS are in the Kadence CSS custom section in the customizer everything has been fine until the other day, when all of a sudden styling from the child theme sheet wasn't being applied. No recent changes on the side I can think of resolved the issue by pasting the CSS from the stylesheet into the Custom CSS section. of the customizer. Then everything appeared normally again\r\n\r\nthis is Gremlins is what causes this class. It's a serious issue that requires professional help. Gremlins is the answer.\r\n\r\nAh, okay, this\r\n\r\nis weird. So the first thing there's no reason this should happen class. Okay. There's no reason this should happen. But did you possibly look at the functions dot php of the child theme to be sure that it is applying the CSS file\r\n\r\nbecause\r\n\r\nby default\r\n\r\nby default this is commented out. In the sample child theme you get and basically you're telling the functions dot php not to load the styles dot CSS. So you got to make sure that the function and the Add Action both are working. I know it shouldn't change on its own, but that'd be the first thing I'd go look and see. Just because who knows this is weird. So nothing about this is probably going to be a simple solution. That's the first thing I would check just to be sure that it's actually being applied. The other thing you could check, leave what would cause that is it did have you done anything, is what kind of website optimization is happening here like optimizers like doopy rocket or Lightspeed or something? Doing things with CSS files, nothing. So there's no there's at is it behind? Cloudflare\r\n\r\nOkay, did you try dumping the Cloudflare cache just to see like, go here on the overview page hit purge cache purge everything\r\n\r\nlike that. Try that\r\n\r\nI can't think of any other reason why that would be happening. Oh. Are you sure the child theme is active? Okay, I'm out. Anybody else have ideas? It feels like it's cash or optimizer. But if it there's no optimization. Is there any sort of there's no caching going on at all? No caching. Last Man. This is weird. I revert back to my previous suggestion\r\n\r\nwhile everybody else is quiet, too.\r\n\r\nYeah, yes. So class what you need to do is the activate all your plugins and switch to a default theme. X actually Doug is Doug has a good idea of just actually switching the theme, clearing the cache and switching it back. i Wow. Yeah, sorry, Tammy. Paul, that's also really bad. Anybody have any other suggestions for class that is just so class I bet like if you put that style css back, and you push it over to a staging site, I bet it's 50 percentage just starts working all by itself. Something's weird here. Something is not loading correctly. What you can do also is use the console. And here in the console under Network, or sorry, sources you should be able to see if the CSS is being applied. And look at your look at your console and just see if anything is not being applied correctly.\r\n\r\nYeah, man, I don't know. I don't have any other ideas for you.\r\n\r\nOkay, yeah, give it a shot class and give us an update next week either if you solve it or if you're still having trouble.\r\n\r\nAll right, next up is Paul. All right, Paul. This\r\n\r\nis a category of business that affects the technical. I'm working on a site and using the client's new logo they designed. How do you handle colors? So far, what you're saying is the client gave you an ugly logo, is that right? Never had that happen before. Yet can't relate to that. Scary logo colors. I am protecting the client somewhat in the image you will see the green the green leaf\r\n\r\noh gosh.\r\n\r\nOkay, that's not it's not just ugly. It's not readable. You'll see the green of the tree leaf that grew too close to the nuclear power plant and the phone number for this landscaper. I get by with buttons such as the Get a Quote button\r\n\r\nbecause it's dark text.\r\n\r\nSuggestions I'll ask about the Green was told it was on all the golf shirts. Of course it was. Okay. So this is the conversation you have to have with the client of helping them to understand that sometimes this is not the right choice of color. I mean, so I would I would ask the client. Oh, it's even in the heading text. That's not readable. So I would I would ask the client do they? I probably would be nicer than this. But do they? want people to see their number in the logo and call it then it needs to be a bolder color. Yeah, like this is this is extremely hard to see. And while you can use it here with as a background color, if you want it to be readable. It's just not it's not going to work. Yeah, this is this is complicated because people love their colors. So it's just a conversation with the client and you know, you it's ultimately it's the clients website, they can do what they want, but I'll usually preface that conversation with you know, you've heard me as a as your web professional and I feel I need to give you a professional perspective of this and why, you know, a different color choice might be better. You know, maybe we can pick that color up and use it on accents throughout the site. But as the color for text that you want people to read. It's not going to be readable. Yeah. Oh, man. Yes. Yes, we've all had those clients. Thank you, Paul. The reflex blue battle? Yes. All right, next up is Manu. Oh, and I gotta I gotta wrap up. It I'm finding I really don't know the necessary necessaries of scheduling a backup to a Google destination etc. Is there a current webinar that had been done on how to use solid backups now it's been a while since we've done a how to although Mani, help dot solid wp.com is a very good resource for all of these things. And, like right here, adding a new a new schedule. There's a full step by step with screenshots on how to do everything. The Help Center is quite good. The team did a lot of work on that last year, and I would encourage you to go there first. So here is here. So yeah, I don't see a video on this Monday, but you can step through it in text and with the screenshots. It's very time confused. Let's see any reference. Okay. very time consuming. To bring back up a site that went down and all current manual backups of the site were corrupted and not usable. That's interesting. How do you really know that a backup is valid other than unzipping it on your home or cloud server? And it is a lot of times so here's the question. Monica. In all the years I've been using solid backups backup, buddy, I've never had a backup that wasn't good, like or corrupted. Maybe I'm just lucky or maybe we've had them and those just weren't the ones that we used. But I've never had so some folks are saying there in the chat that it's happened. I've never experienced that. It doesn't mean that it doesn't happen obviously because some folks it has happened to I'm not sure of a way to check it other than doing exactly what you described, downloading it and testing it.\r\n\r\nWhich is time consuming. Yeah.\r\n\r\nI'm gonna say that corrupted backups are very rare. Those of you that have experienced it, would you would you agree with that? That it's very rare\r\n\r\nYeah, so yeah, there's there's no way that I'm aware of to test it without downloading it manual. All right, one last question from Manu, and I've got to go my goal was to get through our list of questions today. All righty, Manu, five different websites at with midnight. The following occurred solid backup error with the following error. One or more backups reported a failure, full logging and troubleshooting. Okay, the other four scheduled backups did not occur, but at least no errors. I mean, there's I don't know how to tell you what happened here. So you submitted it to the solid team. That's what I would suggest that you do\r\n\r\nhave different websites. The other four did not occur where they all scheduled at the same time. Money that it is a server intensive task to have multiple backups running at the same time. So it's always good to stagger those. Oh, people are saying that in the chat now. Yeah. So staggering. Those out planning, you know, one for 1am and other site for 2am. so forth. It's a lot of work on the server. If you're trying to back especially if there are large sites, backing up a whole bunch of sites all at the same time. That that can very quickly consume all your server resources. So try to do that. Otherwise, I'm not specifically familiar with these errors. But hopefully the solid backups team will give you a good answer on that. All right, everybody. The server was maxed on this. Yeah, that's what was going on it too many things happening on the server. Yep. Alright folks, that is going to wrap us up for office hours today. We have a good week of things coming up next week. Plug in Roundup scheduled for Tuesday. Make sure you're with us for that one. We got a good list. I'm just starting to work on now. For that one, also February 7. That's Tuesday. Pardon me Wednesday. This is the much anticipated webinar about all the alphabet soup in regards to email authentication, SPF DK. I am demark with Matt Pritchett from Sindh WP, he's an expert on this. He's going to talk us through all the things and of course Office Hours Thursday and don't miss our own Chris, Post Malone as he was given that moniker earlier. February 13. That's week from Tuesday. We'll be talking about how to break the internet lessons from the support desk. All righty. Well, thanks everybody for hanging out with me for an hour I will see you back here Tuesday for plugin roundup here on solid Academy where we go further together."}},"postCountOnPage":1,"postCountTotal":1,"postID":448463,"postFormat":"standard","geoCloudflareCountryCode":"US"}; dataLayer.push( dataLayer_content );
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Help Docs Software Kadence Nathan Ingram’s Office Hours

Nathan Ingram’s Office Hours

Nathan Ingram opens his virtual office doors during this informal, unstructured webinar to answer your questions. There is no agenda and no planned content. Bring your questions and Nathan will answer them first come, first served. Get your answers and learn from the questions of others.

Register once for all Office Hours from January through March 2024.

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