\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 April 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_LBE7CmvaTSeHL4X4_pmB7g","livestream_replay_set":0,"livestream_vimeo_video_id":944593621,"livestream_chat_log":"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1QprP7bxv9n8yuH-_qWRJecRwacZU7bft\/view?usp=sharing","livestream_live_transcript_url":"https:\/\/otter.ai\/u\/Cs9TyoIueRVc1vepdCzEYoBcz8U?utm_source=copy_url","livestream_live_transcript_text":"Nathan Ingram 0:44 \r\nWelcome Welcome everybody. Sorry I'm a few minutes late getting things going here Why didn't see everybody popping in Welcome welcome. Open up the chat say hello. You've got a question to ask better get it in now we have 13 questions in the queue everybody woke up this week. Hey Doris. Hey Phoebe, Chris All right. Also, we're gonna have David Johnson popping in in a little bit to chat about some things going on with solid WP interesting things. Let me get our captions started\r\n\r\nAll right, everybody. Welcome. Welcome. Glad you're here. We're just about ready to get going just about a minute to go before we get started. Office Hours. Lots of questions in the list today. 13 questions in the queue once again, if you are. If you haven't asked a question yet, and you'd like to please use the link in the chat. Good to see everybody. We're just about ready to start officially here. Many many questions in the queue today. Great to see everybody\r\n\r\nthat you have a few questions. There are a few from back. Yes. All right, y'all. It's three after let me get the recording started and we will dive in. All right, everybody. Happy Thursday. Welcome to office hours here on solid Academy. Glad you're all here. My name is Nathan Ingram. Good to have you all in the office today. Many questions in the list today. 13 in the queue already. So if you have a question that you want to have answered, be sure to click the link in the chat and get that question in. We're going to start off today. Let's see if we can get the buttons clicked correctly. We're going to start off today. With David Johnson, the product owner at solid WP he's gonna pop in here as a nother panelist. And actually I'm gonna turn off my screen share so we can get more David Johnson on the screen. Hopefully we can. We have problems with this last time, David Are you able to get in?\r\n\r\nDavid Johnson 3:37 \r\nI am here and I don't seem to be able to turn on my live video, which might not be a bad thing for those who don't want more David Johnson on the screen.\r\n\r\nNathan Ingram 3:49 \r\nWe had this issue last time and I wonder why that is. Let's say you\r\n\r\nDavid Johnson 3:53 \r\ncan't start your video because the host has stopped it Nathan it says you're discriminating against me somehow here I don't know.\r\n\r\nNathan Ingram 3:59 \r\ni It's nothing personal. i Okay, I'm going to make you the host but that's what we did last time. And I don't know why this happened. We'll have it. So. Okay. All right. You should be able to yeah, there is\r\n\r\nDavid Johnson 4:16 \r\nsorry. Yeah.\r\n\r\nNathan Ingram 4:17 \r\nI believe that the world needs a little more. A little more shiny head love today.\r\n\r\nDavid Johnson 4:21 \r\nIt's absolutely. I love your hairstyle man. I always have 100%\r\n\r\nNathan Ingram 4:27 \r\nAll right. Welcome, everybody. So those of you that haven't met David David is the product owner at solid WP that basically means you translate geek to English and English to geek is that pretty much right?\r\n\r\nDavid Johnson 4:37 \r\nThat's a great way to put it and some days better than others.\r\n\r\nNathan Ingram 4:42 \r\nSo the idea really is that David kind of functions between the marketing team and users and developers so that the products that we create are, you know, actually what people want to use, which is a novel concept, right?\r\n\r\nDavid Johnson 4:57 \r\nWell, wouldn't that be great? That would be that would be a great outcome. Indeed, would you try\r\n\r\nNathan Ingram 5:05 \r\nSo David has hung out in office hours a few times. And a couple of those times you took some there's some questions that popped up that you just immediately went back to the dev team and got some answers on and that was awesome. Glad\r\n\r\nDavid Johnson 5:16 \r\nto do it when it's possible. Yeah. So\r\n\r\nNathan Ingram 5:19 \r\nDavid is going to periodically drop in here for an office hours from time to time. So David, can you tell us anything about what's going on?\r\n\r\nDavid Johnson 5:27 \r\nIt's solid. Well, Nathan, there are some exciting things happening. There actually, there are a lot of things happening and there it may even seem like some silence from us actually, because we you may have noticed if you were paying attention to the speed, the frequency with which we release new versions of some of our solid products that some of that might have changed here recently. And so there's one item that I'm super excited about that is still very, very hush hush and so we'll be careful in what we say. But I am thrilled to announce that we have something new happening in the world of backups and I mean, I can say more I in fact, we have an internal codename for it but there's there are so many things that are not yet fully decided. But I guess Nathan, if it makes sense, I can share a little bit about sort of the genesis of this and what we're what we're kind of generally working toward, does that sound good? Like? Okay, cool. So this started with a question that we asked ourselves and that is what would it look like if we could power a backup solution? Almost entirely, if not entirely from the server end and have it rely on the speed and performance and everything else of our infrastructure rather than on the hosting infrastructure that any given backups user might have at their disposal? So you know, maybe you have a really super expensive hosting account, and you've got great resources at your disposal. Great, you know, backups work beautifully, I'm sure for you other people who use solid backups have more constrained hosting environments where maybe memory or speed or performance or other things are limits because hey, we don't all have infinite resources to spend on our hosting accounts. Right? So what would it look like if we we as solid as the solid team could use our hosting or not our hosting infrastructure, but our server infrastructure to make backups work more speedily, more reliably, and maybe even improve the overall outcome in some other ways, too. So that's how it started. And those are some of the questions that we've asked ourselves and we are pretty excited to say that some of our early testing is very promising about this. So it's, it's pretty, pretty exciting stuff. And I'm watching some of the some of the chats come in here.\r\n\r\nNathan Ingram 8:07 \r\nSo I don't think y'all are gonna get much out of David today. I kind of twisted his arm to come in and share that much.\r\n\r\nDavid Johnson 8:13 \r\nYeah. Again, this is one of those moments where it's like, wow, we don't have a release date yet. We are working on you know a lot of the engineering and that sort of stuff. I will say that our goal is to release it as quickly as possible. And I've never seen something come together quite this quickly. That has this level of sophistication. And are one of our goals is also to make whatever this new thing is super, super simple to use. So anyway, I again, I'm limited in what I can say I'm happy to entertain questions, but I don't know how entertaining I'll be. So\r\n\r\nNathan Ingram 8:55 \r\nthat's awesome. So yes, there are things happening. It's solid that we're pretty excited about. So yeah, so he's not going to we're not going to answer anything. Any specifics? Yeah. Other than just what David said was, the backup solution lives on solid servers, not your server. Okay, so take that. Sue is threatening to remove m&ms from you, David, that's that's a serious threat in our world. As\r\n\r\nDavid Johnson 9:25 \r\nlong as I get to keep the green ones. I think we're good or wait, are those the ones I don't want to I always get that backwards. I don't know. It's the old Van Halen story right about the m&ms But anyway, yeah. So su as far as I know, I would say probably, probably not. But that's a very preliminary answer to the question about Yeah, he did reject a Brown was, wasn't it? Yes. Right. But as far as I know, probably nothing special needs to happen on your server. But again, as far as I know, and probably are doing a lot of work in that response.\r\n\r\nNathan Ingram 10:00 \r\nSo this is the benefit of showing up for office hours, y'all you never know when a little tidbit is gonna get dropped. Yeah, you never know enough. So David's gonna be hanging out through Office Hours. If you have questions or any feedback or anything you want to note, you can just drop it there in the chat. And yeah, is the backup solution. Who can we talk about? Is it going to work with external destinations?\r\n\r\nDavid Johnson 10:22 \r\nI will say that when it initially releases the answer is currently that it will only work with one destination and this is this is one that will provide. So it's a it's a it's a new way of approaching backups for us and and so all of that to say there are engineering and other questions around whether we can still deliver on our promise for speed and performance and other things if we support other destinations. And that's one reason why there's a question mark next to other destinations in the future. But as of right now, at least when it releases, it will just be one. Yeah. So good question. I do see some other other other questions there. And there's there are decisions being made around you know, is this is this going to still be solid backups, or is it going to be some new product name and so forth? I will say that if you are a solid backup subscriber, I think that you're going to be happy with what happens. But there will be ways to make you unhappy that I haven't dreamed up yet. And so what I will say is that if if you find yourself unhappy with what happens, you have my permission to reach out to me personally and we will talk about it. Yeah.\r\n\r\nNathan Ingram 11:46 \r\nSo folks, that's that's again, it's, you're in the in crowd here. This is not something that's been talked about at all anywhere else. And you can David you're in the solid Academy slack group, right people can pick a\r\n\r\nDavid Johnson 11:58 \r\nyam Yeah, I do. I do pop in from time to time and I've even answered a thing or two over there. So yeah, if you want to reach out I will say also Nathan, is it okay to solicit volunteers 100% Okay. So if you're really, really interested in learning more about this, and I see I see those I see that hand Yes. Thank you, Paul. If you are interested in tinkering with something when it is in beta and definitely not ready for public release, then we are definitely interested in having a few folks jump in and try it out. And alpha is is probably a more accurate way to describe it, Chris. So, but yeah, if you're interested in that, then definitely. I mean, you can you're welcome to go ahead and ping me you can you can drop me an email. You can ping me on the on the on the I hesitate to say on the slack on the academy slack. But yes, we're building a list. I don't know how soon we'll be ready. For this. But we definitely would love and it was originally Nathan, you you supported this internally. We had a conversation about this. Like there's no group of people we'd rather have play with this than you from the Academy. So if that's of interest to you, then we would love to pull you in. I don't have an estimate yet. So I'm sorry. But that's I've already probably said more than I should have. So\r\n\r\nNathan Ingram 13:17 \r\ny'all y'all don't say anything about this. Seriously. No tweets this week anymore. I was I don't know what you call it.\r\n\r\nDavid Johnson 13:24 \r\nThere's we need a new verb for posting on x because there's just not a good way to say that but yes, I'm still there. on that on that network, formerly known as Twitter.\r\n\r\nNathan Ingram 13:33 \r\nBev tweeted it but nobody follows her on Twitter, so\r\n\r\nDavid Johnson 13:34 \r\nit's okay. Oh, good. retweeted.\r\n\r\nNathan Ingram 13:40 \r\nI mean, Beth, you asked for it right. There it is. Okay. Ah, all right. So, anything else, David any other bombs you want to throw?\r\n\r\nDavid Johnson 13:49 \r\nYou know, there are some other new things in the works. I don't I don't think I can get into too many specifics about that. But we are excited about that. Honestly, I think 2024 will have turned out to be a really, really exciting year for some new things.\r\n\r\nNathan Ingram 14:04 \r\nSo let me just let me rewind just a minute if people want to be on that alpha, beta, testing, whatever version list should they eat? What's the what should they do? Should they email you?\r\n\r\nDavid Johnson 14:16 \r\nThe best thing to do actually, would be to email me just drop me an email is David at solid wp.com. And if you could drop me an email I will add you to an internal list. And then we will we will reach out when we get closer we'll do is we'll give you some heads up when we're when we're formulating our actual process for testing. But, but yeah, if drop me an email, that would be the very, very best way to do it. And then that way, I can save all those emails in one spot and then reach out when it's time.\r\n\r\nNathan Ingram 14:43 \r\nPerfect. All right. I think I still have the ability to flip you back over to attendee but we'll see if the world hot ops everybody then just come back\r\n\r\nDavid Johnson 14:53 \r\nout. If not, I can I can just rejoin so that's okay, too.\r\n\r\nNathan Ingram 14:57 \r\nI think we'll be okay. Okay, so yeah, all right. Great to have David as always, and we'll, yeah. You have questions or comments to him. You can chat him there in the Zoom chat or on Slack or you got his email there as well. Thanks, David. Hey,\r\n\r\nDavid Johnson 15:10 \r\nthank you, Nathan. And thank you, everybody. We'll I'll be around for the rest of office hours but it just not in your face.\r\n\r\nNathan Ingram 15:16 \r\nAwesome. Thanks. All right, everybody. We have a ton of questions to get to so interesting stuff right. Going to be very interesting. Oh, let me mention one other thing I did. post about this in the academy slack and perhaps you saw this, but I just added today. The live stream that we talked about a few weeks ago, since there's not a premium event in May as I'll be celebrating my 30th anniversary with my wife. We are doing this two hour workshop and that's actually going to be next Wednesday. So a week from yesterday. We're going to do this AI Plugin Creation workshop. And the goal here is I'm going to walk you through the the ideation and process of how do we think about talking with a tool like chat GPT to produce a pretty specific plugin. And the goal here is to rebuild what I talked about in office hours, a few weeks back, we're going to be combining meta box and Gravity Forms with some code that's going to create a very light Events Management plugin so that when you set an end date on an on an event, custom post type, then it will automatically flip that over to like a past event versus a regular upcoming event and will integrate a gravity form for registration. So that's what we're going to be working through. And again, the goal here is not so much to have a clean, beautiful 100% Working plugin at the end, it is very likely we're going to break things and through that process of breaking and fixing learning how to develop a plugin with AI, a simple plugin with AI and a tool like chat GPT so it's gonna be a lot of fun that is coming up. It's a two hour live stream. That is on Wednesday, this coming Wednesday from one to 3pm Central. This is brand new today. So if you haven't registered yet the link is in the chat. So it's not so it's not in premium courses, because it's not a course. It is actually we're just calling this a live stream. So it's in the list of live streams right here. All right. So make sure you sign up for that that is going to be a lot of fun and I'm expecting to blow things up and then fix them. That's why we're calling it a workshop. Okay, let's see where we are on questions. Now. We have 13 questions in the list. If you have a question you haven't asked yet. The link is now in the chat. No Karen, we are just getting started. So you are just in time. So let's find all the windows. All right. First question today is from Karen. Hey, how about that Karen? Like on cue? Perfect. All right. Karen says we're redesigning a website for a client that uses a very simple membership plugin called simple membership. The way simple membership works is it just uses the page and the client adds everything to that page for logged in paying members. The issue is it's a very long page. I can only imagine so basically this plugin is unlocking access to that page, right. So let's take a look at Oh my Lord have mercy. Okay, you weren't lying Karen Lee macro. I can't even zoom appropriately. There we go like this is. Okay. That is a very long page. You are correct. All right. So we're looking for a very streamlined, lightweight membership plugin to replace it. The requirements for this site are minimal user registration, three subscriber levels integration with MailChimp. Pay Pal as the payment method really painful and not much we're thinking of restrict content Pro, but not sure it's the best for the site's purposes. Do you think this will fit or others we recommend? Okay, great. Karen. Question for you. You're still here, right Karen? Yes. Okay, so Karen, is this a recurring membership or is it a you buy it once it's unlocked? You have it forever it's recurring. Okay. So and you'll you'll want in the, you will want in the members dashboard, the ability to cancel that recurrence and probably you'll want emails that go out to the member at certain times, right. Like reminding them their membership or if their card can't be okay. So, first, I will tell you that PayPal is horrible to work with in these circumstances. Virtually all membership platforms are going to support PayPal, but it is a nightmare. And if you can get the client over to stripe instead, it's just going to be easier for everybody. I don't know if they're open to that but PayPal not only is it difficult technically to work with because it's just a lot of technical debt and it's just weird. They do weird things. Also, they all if there's ever a dispute about payment Pay Pal is really heavy. Handed on against the vendor. So it's just in they're hard to deal with. Anyway, that's a side point. If you can get them over to stripe, it's going to be better all the way around. So restrict content pro it Yeah. So if it was a one time purchase, I'd recommend maybe even using a gravity form with a user registration. That with the payment gives the user a role and then you have role based access to the course. However, since it's going to be a recurrent, you need something that has a UI that can handle, you know canceling memberships and so forth. And you're going to need something that does email reminders, so restrict content Pro will work for that. paid membership Pro, as Melanie Melanie mentioned in the chat is also a very good solution for this. Yeah, so you're going to need something like that I would lean towards paid memberships Pro or restrict content Pro. So what what is it about? You've looked at our CP, a paid membership Pro. Basically does what restrict content Pro does it both of those plugins, in essence, create a registration process a membership which can be recurring, and it will handle the emails that need to and you really do need those reminder emails to remind people that that reduces chargebacks especially if the membership is like an annual membership isn't an annual membership, Karen. It's a monthly membership. So probably not as big of a deal for those reminder emails then that they're going to be billed. But you definitely want emails that let them know hey, your card couldn't be charged or whatever. Yep. So that's what restrict content Pro does. And the feature set of paid membership Pro is basically the same. It they're both really good solutions. So yeah, both of those will work. So is there is there anything that I'm missing that you're thinking that restrict content, bro might be too much, or pay membership pro might be overkill? Is there something specific about that I can give you some feedback on that sounds like both of those would fit the bill. Here they're both gonna give a members dashboard to control all the things\r\n\r\nYeah, good. Okay, great. So glad that was helpful. Karen, let us then. And oh, by the way, if you rebuild this, clearly, you probably want to break these up into sections. And both paid membership Pro and restrict content Pro will allow you to create like what depending on how many courses let me ask you this. How many courses are on the site? Did your question say that?\r\n\r\nOh, it's not a course. Yes. So just finish with the content. I'd make a custom post type out of this. And then just show posts and they could click into the post. And that way with either restrict content Pro or paid membership pro at the custom post type level, you can restrict access there instead of having to do it with every one of the posts. That makes it really easy. All righty, next up is Beth and we haven't done a dancing Beth GIF in a while. Let's do let's do the third one. Yeah, I forget what this one is. Dancing Beth. She comes slowly. Hey there she is. At WP, y'all last year. All right. See ready to go. All right, Beth. Here we go. It seems to be a common problem lately that the iPad 12 Pro does not use a tablet breakpoint. It's not just me. It's all over Reddit and stack overflow. So in my case, where I have used Elementor to set some elements to not show on desktop or tablet or vice versa. The iPad Pro shows all versions that's what is this Elementor thing that you're referring to? quite sure what that is. I mean, you had to call it that, didn't you Beth. Okay. Anyway, all right. So this is gorgeous. Okay, well, that's just terrible. Alright, so I see what you're frustrated about. Ah, okay. So, I have used Elementor for a total of like, five minutes in my entire adult life. And I don't know how they do break, but I would hope that they do break points by a certain pixel width. So okay, you're saying it's not an elementary problem. It shows up for other page builders. So like what what she'd have to look at is, what is the screen with the resolution? How many pixels is the iPad 12 Pro emulating in portrait mode. So if I were to pull up Blisk here let's just take a quick look, thing. Everything is slow today.\r\n\r\nWe bumped this over to iPad 12. So we're looking at a 1024 width. So you just need to make sure that whatever page builder you're using that you've got typically these three breakpoints small, medium large, and some like The new Beaver Builder has extra large and they're all for certain, you know, resolution ranges. So it sounds like to me that you're in Elementor if for whatever reason 10 to 24 is showing the large screen size or whatever. I don't know if element. I mean I hope Elementor has a custom break point. I just don't know. You're not setting the breakpoints in Elementor. Like where are the breakpoints being set\r\n\r\nUnknown Speaker 27:50 \r\nokay\r\n\r\nNathan Ingram 27:56 \r\nyeah, so whenever I have an issue like this, I just you know, you've got to look at what is my block like Kadence blocks are my Elementor or my page builder, Beaver Builder or whatever. Melanie says they have custom breakpoints, but not by sighs Yeah, it's so it sounds like what is happening is you're falling in the middle of some defined breakpoints. Elementor has. Yeah, and you got to deal with it with media queries, like Melanie saying but and that that's weird because you would think Elementor would have a solution for this. Yeah. So I don't know specifically how it's not okay. It's not your right. It's not specifically in Elementor problem, but Well, like I have we haven't experienced this issue with sites that we build in Beaver Builder. We're not seeing an issue here in Kadence blocks. So it's a breakpoint issue. Right. So there's something about Elementor the settings in Elementor that are causing this to show multiple things\r\n\r\nso you're, what you're setting breakpoints with yellow pencil and I'm not quite sure what that is. You maybe is that like a CSS tool Beth. Okay, maybe you're having a conflict somehow with yellow pencil and Elementor.\r\n\r\nYeah, so if you're having this issue without fully being able to test all of this, you're probably just going to have to go in and set custom CSS for the range of breakpoints where it occurs. Here's what I would suggest that you do. I've got this really super cool. Chrome extension. That is called something it is called viewport dimensions, this one viewport dimensions Google this. I find this super helpful. Because what it will do is that if you look down at the bottom of the screen here, whenever I resize the browser window, oh wait, I'm in the wrong helps if you have the extension enabled, really, really does. It's not enabled for this browser. Profile. Alright, so now let's see down there. You can actually you can see the exact pixel points. And that is really helpful. too, if you're dealing with breakpoint issues and CSS. All right. Let's move on to the next question, which is also Beth.\r\n\r\nDNS question. Taking a new site live added to Cloudflare and it carried over to a records from GoDaddy cloudways instruction set add to a records one for the root and one for the www really? Can should I delete the two records that carried over from GoDaddy? Well, it depends on what those records were. Do we know what those records were? Is there a way you can let me know that cloudways says add an A record with the IP address for the relay. That's interesting because generally like the recommendation that most people will give myself included is that www is a CNAME. That pushes to the the at record of the domain. That's odd. Those of you that use cloudways Are you are you using an A record for www because that makes the server it just it's not a huge deal really. But it's like that makes the server do the redirection instead of handling that up at the DNS level which doesn't make sense to me Yeah, I would anyway but yes, you delete it's likely find that you can delete those Beth before you said you said you deleted them and you're good okay. So we'll move on. I would. I can't say without knowing what those records were. All right, one more from Beth. When checking DNS propagation with what's my DNS, why do I see red X's in some major cities? Like Paris? That is because Paris does not like furniture stores. And that's my answer to that question. Yeah, so it happens sometimes, especially when you're propagating. You may find that some of these do like right here. I don't know why that does that. But it does. And we could do, we may run this again. Basically, this is saying, What's my DNS did not get a timely response from these DNS servers. Sometimes when you do it. Yes. See, this time it did. So it's fine. I see that happened to nothing to worry about. Alrighty, next up is Karen. Cloudflare question here. We go. Okay, when checking DNS propagation, where during the Cloudflare class, I mentioned that I can't get a address to work with the WAF rules, and it's still true. I can't figure out how to allow it on the email reports. It's saying zero URLs were analyzed and no data. Okay, so that means that yeah, likely a trust is getting blocked by Cloudflare. You still here and still here? Okay. I followed everything in the class check with Troy Glancy on tab he said to add all the options to the verified bot category, which he did.\r\n\r\nYeah, yep. So usually H refs falls in here. I also created an H refs list and add all three underneath for eyepiece. Good Lord have mercy. Found the ASN Okay, yeah, so this is frustrating. The Welcome to so remember, remember the big fat caveat that I gave at that beginning of the Cloudflare course? How sometimes this just requires trial and error. We're in trial and error mode here. So I wish there was like a silver bullet list of rules that just worked for everybody there is not such a thing. So I, so here's, let me just keep going. I found the event and check. Okay, you found the event that was blocking H refs, and I'm reading that right Aaron? Check the IP. Okay, so notice some of the, I'm gonna keep reading and then I think I know what's going on here. I did notice some of the events for H refs, or skip and manage challenge. It seems like we've been trying to isolate a trespass skip adding the IP address the ASN I've contacted support and they're not helpful. They just give you the IPS okay.\r\n\r\nWhy do I see red X's in major cities like Paris? Okay. So, I think let me ask you a question. So you have added this this the skip rule. Okay, and is the skip? Did you let me just open up Cloudflare here is your skip rule. At the top or like the first or the second rule in your list?\r\n\r\nYeah, okay, so here's what I would check. Because what may be happening is your country rule is preventing a traffic from hitting the site. Like for example, GT metrics comes in from Canada at the free version. And so if you have a US only traffic rule, then it's always going to block GT metrics unless you've skipped it in the skip rules. So where am I? Why security WAF Okay, so like right here, if you're country rule is here at the top. Then, like, if you if you have added it in this order, like I did, I think this is leftover from the course. Then and if if h refs is coming in from a country that's not listed here, it's gonna block it. So it Yeah, so if you move your skip up to the first rule, and then just make sure that bla bla bla bla bla that all the boxes are checked, checked. What that tells it to do is skip everything else. So anything that is skipped in that first rule doesn't even look at the other rules that are remaining. So that might be what it is, and what you could check is looking at the event and check the country that it's coming in for like when you found that event, or H refs see what country it's coming in on my gut says that's what's blocking. That's what's causing your issue. I've seen that happen too. And the good news is once you get this all ironed out, then you can just use your rule set because you know it's going to work on all your sites. Canada, was that it right in Canada was blocked in your block rule or chat your challenge rule. Better that was it\r\n\r\nall right. Did that solve the problem? It is I might do a little dance. That's all you get. And that was blocked. All right. That was it. So that that was what was going on? I bet you that does solve it. Because if it was coming in and getting challenged, it would be challenged because of the order in the country. Yeah, try that and see if it works. I bet you it'll work. All right. Next up is Ben be another cloud. Okay. Ben are you here, Ben? Yes, you hear? Hey, Ben. Okay, following the WordPress update on Wednesday we cleared all caching at the hosting level for all sites after the update was applied. No problem. We have two Divi sites. One Divi site appeared to be correct. Let me tell y'all something. Chris Malone loves Divi loves it. Once all your Divi work just email him. Okay, one Divi. What What if y'all only knew what Divi site appeared to be correct After clearing the cache however, overnight, it appears the layout of the page was not appearing correctly due to the cache. After clearing the Cloudflare cache and also pausing and unpause in CloudFlare, the site appears Why is one site requiring the cloud level cache to be cleared and the others not been doing caching? By caching? Caching? Ben, are you using any sort of optimizer plugin on that Divi site like Lightspeed or they'd be rocket or something like that? SiteGround I don't think the SiteGround optimizer let you connect to Cloudflare does it?\r\n\r\nOkay, this is gonna keep happening. Because what happens is your Cloudflare Cloudflare is pulling assets out to the edge so that it can serve those efficiently from the from the data center closest to the requester. And so this is going to keep happening. And unless you're optim or some unless something on the website can tell Cloudflare to clear its cache now. Good. So that's that's really terrible to say it that way. Many premium optimizing plugins such as Lightspeed, WP Rocket hummingbird etc. Have like we talked about in the course, have that Cloudflare connector, right with an API, so that when it flushes locally, it'll flush the Cloudflare cache as well. This is going to keep happening because of that issue. And so you just have to turn off Cloudflare cache so you would do that here by just creating going into cache cache rules. And then just use this no caching rule I gave you in the in the course which basically says it just something that's always going to trigger would be HTTPS is on and then bypass the cache, that that will turn off caching completely for the site. You don't have to use this um, you could use anything that's always going to be true. But this just said, I mean, every every bit of traffic that comes into the site is going to be SSL. So that's just a way to say all traffic is turned and then you're going to bypass the cache. So unfortunately, yeah. So other sites don't require the Cloudflare cache yet. Like this is this is the caching is freakin annoying. It just is and sometimes this happens and sometimes it doesn't. We have this problem. Also, with some of our sites, you'd log in in the CSS was wonky, and some other ones you would it and there was no until that's when we realized what Cloudflare was doing. And we connected up the Lightspeed plugin and it all worked. So it's just it's caching is unpredictable. It just is so disabled that the fix is disabled Cloudflare caching, if you should have really, in hindsight, I would add this to the course. Or to be more clear about this. If you if you cannot automatically flush the Cloudflare cache on WordPress updates, then turn the Cloudflare cache off. Does that make sense? Otherwise you will continue to have this problem. Okie dokie Next up, Beth.\r\n\r\nAll right, bear clarification on DNS postmark setup followed your instructions and web foundations for setting up postmark easy peasy it is right. Then I went to the training on what you need to know about email authentication understanding all the alphabet soup and now I'm confused okay. I understand the DKM record is the CNAME Name record provided by postmark Yes. Is the SPF record. Okay. There so. Okay. I understand why you're confused. They forgot the best way into this. Okay. The SPF record for a domain that is says let me say the different talking myself out on how smart I'll start here. postmark does not require an SPF record for its services. It handles all of that internally. And there's a there's a doc there that talks about that. You don't need an SPF record for postmark. If your domain has email like Gmail or office 365 or whatever you do need whatever SPF record your email provider gives you to add to the DNS, okay. So you don't you will never see an SPF record that contains any reference to postmark because it handles all that internal Does that make sense? Beth? Totally makes sense why? That was confusing. Okay. None of my clients send large volumes of email but I'm setting them up with demark Yeah, why not? Do I just use the Cloudflare method? I would. It's like a click click and it's done. Really? You know that will give you the no blocky demark line. And it just works. If I mean my advice to you would be don't get into the demark game. It's demark dealing with demark is much more of a of a work type that fits in the IT bucket versus web bucket. Like demark smells too much like email to me because it is email and I like I'm allergic to Email Setup. It just my life got so much better. Years ago when I stopped doing email for clients. So if and when your client decides they want to hire an IT person who can help them deal with whatever all that stuff. Great. The settings are there but for now, just using the Cloudflare quick setting to add the P equals none record the demark record that gives Google and Yahoo what they need to not block email. Okay, that I get that good enough Beth, are you good? Okie dokie next up is Hillary. Okay. Hillary says we build a lot of local business websites. Is there a way to be able to enter their name, address phone number call to action into item so that we can put the item into our starter template? Yes, there is. And then we only have to put the company details into WordPress once Yes, yes. Yes, there is. We actually do that in our base site. I showed how to do that on Oh dear. I'll never be able to find it. Now. Hillary it was a one of the Starter Site workshops from maybe two years ago. Question mark. Anyway, usually in those Starter Site courses, there's something extra I do that's different. Like it's, I don't know something extra to add. This was one of them it was using meta box. So in our base site for example, we use meta box to create a custom settings page that lives under dashboard that says business info, and it's got all sorts of stuff. You know the name logos, all the everything we need to push. Like we actually generate schema that lives in the footer based on all the business info office the off hours address. We have a Google Map embed box and that goes out to a predefined spot on the contact page where just pulls that in like that we do this with all of our sites and it saves a lot of time usually probably 90% of our sites fit into being able to use that so 100% recommend that really cool saves us a lot of time. So you're onto something here. Just create it make a custom settings page with meta box and you'll have all your stuff there. Irises has a nice little tabbed interface with the different areas it's pretty cool. Yeah, like we automatically in the footer area where the address goes. We fill that automatically from the business info. Yeah. Pretty cool. All right, next up is Doris. David, are you still here\r\n\r\nis it true that restrict content Pro is going away? I have not officially heard that. And I don't have any information. To really say any more about that.\r\n\r\nSo I can't answer that question, Doris. I don't I don't know. Anything. specific about that. All right. Next up is Gene a gene.\r\n\r\nHow to add an image behind text in Beaver Builder okay, I'm trying to add a background image behind text in Beaver Builder right now I have the image added into a separate row above the text row and adjusted a lot of negative margin. Oh that sounds pain. But it is difficult to get it yes on mobile exactly negative margin not it's not. I mean, negative margin is a last resort. The image should be offset to overlap the row. Okay, good. Good. I want an example. Does anybody like me I have trouble translating written word descriptions of layout things into like actual. Okay. The image is the blue transparent trying. Okay. Oh, this. Okay. This is what we're talking about. Yeah, this really isn't I love the site. This is really pretty. I just want to\r\n\r\nBeth, I could read all the words and still have to think about it for a little while. Also tried adding the image into the column that this cuts off the edges. This is going to be hard Jean.\r\n\r\nIsolating the images the background image into the row and manage CSS by mean equals Z. White. Congratulations. We're trying all these things. This is all really difficult. Last option can be found.\r\n\r\nOkay, so let me just clarify Jean. You don't like I think this looks great. How's it is that you don't like the way this looks? Is that right? Or the client doesn't like the way this looks\r\n\r\nokay, this is where it gets messy on mobile\r\n\r\nand this is with the image overlaid in a row above. Oh, I see what you name. This is CSS hell is what this is. Hold him and you got some Z index issues here too. Yeah, see what you mean.\r\n\r\nJean Let me guess this was delivered to the client by a designer who loves to Design for Print. Right. Oh, you Okay, so, this is self inflicted? I really liked the concept. I really do. Okay, and this really like this triangle thing matches the sailboat which is just how like, yeah. All right. So it's a great idea. The problem is how in the world Okay, so you tried my first inkling here was to was to put it in that make it the background. So you tried putting it as the background image in the column right. And have you tried like\r\n\r\nand when you put it as the background image of the column had got cut off by the column with that knee it asked out so I would go. Whatever you do here is going to be complicated. I think it's going to be less painful to put the image in the background of the column. And then to add the different breakpoints write CSS that sizes, the image inside the container of the column. I think that's going to be the simplest way forward and like like class says, if you set it to contain\r\n\r\nin Yeah, and like Chris was saying you what you may do also, and we do this actually, it's not uncommon for us to do this is to have in Beaver Builder have multiple you can't do this as well in Kadence. But in Beaver Builder will have multiple rows for different viewports in Kadence, if you turn off a row in a viewport, it still actually loads the DOM for that element. It's still actually there in the HTML it's just hidden. In Beaver Builder, it actually doesn't show so you might with Beaver Builder, you could actually have different rows that place it exactly where you want for your extra large large medium small. Yeah. I really liked this design gene. This is cool. It's a cool effect. And a great job here. Am I saying negative margin is bad. I mean negative margin is problematic and you're experiencing you're experiencing that here right? Because it's just it's it creates the degree of wonkiness created by negative margin is higher than other ways you could do this. Plus, you're loaded a ton of DOM elements just to get that background image. But nice work. Yeah, like it has to load all the div the whole div tree for that row. Just to get the background now. That's it's not it's not a huge deal. But don't know if I noodle on this for a while I might be able to figure out something different but that the I would start I think you'll have less pain if you go the background image of the column route and then just manipulate it from there. All right, we still have several so I'm gonna move on just for the sake of time here and next up is Ben Mr. Anderson. Oh dear, that time of the day where I cannot copy and paste with any level of proficiency. Here we go. I have two popups on product pages that I built with Kadence conversions. After installing a consent plug in the pop up link does not work. Okay, I see no errors JavaScript or PHP any idea of what could be the issue. The pop up links are called something I'm not going to try to pronounce. Live site which is not working is this\r\n\r\nUnknown Speaker 56:37 \r\nokay, so this is\r\n\r\nNathan Ingram 56:45 \r\nthe dev site that Okay, wait a minute. Hey, Ben, are you here so this live site it gave me the consent window. Just then. Oh, see sighs guy\r\n\r\nokay, my guess well, let me let me look at see what it's supposed to be doing\r\n\r\nis this what I should click? Okay, yeah, it's it's dropping the All right. Interesting.\r\n\r\nIn this okay. So it was working before you added the consent plugin.\r\n\r\nOkay, so probably what's going on? Is that consent plugin is blocking whatever the jQuery is. That's running that pop up but I thought I\r\n\r\nis this agree the orange one? Okay. So I agree. It's not working. I think you have a there's a misconfiguration somehow somewhere in that consent plugin. That is blocking the jQuery from loading that allows that conversion pop up to appear. So I'm not quite sure how you would figure out what that is can use. A lot of consent plugins will scan the site to find the various things the JavaScript and so forth. Maybe to make sure that this page, for example has been correctly scanned, and it is pulling in that JavaScript but it's this is most likely the consent plugin is not allowing that JavaScript to load. So that's, that's where I would start resolving it. Dig into that consent plugin and figure out how you can add that JavaScript to always load a lot of them will say these are essential, like the term again and one for example. It's essential. It's, you know, marketing, it's whatever. And the essential ones always load. And if if consent magic doesn't give you that option, you may want to get a different consent plugin that gives you that level of control, because, you know, it's likely it's your consent plugin. Being too heavy handed and not allowing the central script to load. All right, next up is Beth. All right, I just realized I have a Cloudflare. I have Cloudflare set up for dopey roadmaps, but not separately for Academy. Should I set up another Cloudflare account? No, you do not this subdomains live in the same Cloudflare account and this is interesting. When you add adding a subdomain is done here in the Cloudflare DNS with a CNAME. And the WAF rules apply across the board. So Beth you do not have to set up a separate account. You can't because this is the DNS for the domain. WP roadmaps.com. So when that's added as a CNAME it inherits all the settings that you have at WP roadmaps. Good Alright, David's out y'all. Thanks for hanging out. David. Okay, next up is Karen. Oops. Good night. That's big. Fall. It's not a trick question. I realized the question was about managed challenges a moot point. We don't want a trusted domains challenge. Okay. You're good. We saw that earlier though. Right. Okay. You're good. All right. Next is Karen. All right, looks like moving the skip rule number one worked. Yes. Awesome. Well consider office hours of success today. Out of all those things I showed you that I added for H refs, should I remove them? All and just keep the verified bot list? Probably you can take all that stuff out because it's basically saying the same thing. Probably this, the Cloudflare smart enough to know what H refs is. And so when you do the skip verified bot is SEO or whatever. That's enough, it should catch that. If it doesn't, then you know to start adding things back until you get it until it's it's good, but that likely the bot category is all you need. Now here's one thing I will say. There are some of those SEO tools. Like I've heard multiple times. How was it h refs or the Yeah, what's the other one? I'm blanking, but they would like they're like hammering away at this site and just killing the bandwidth. And so if that happens, and if that tool are SEMrush, thank you. Yes, sem Rush was just banging away at a site for whatever reason, then that category might not work. And you might need to disallow that. That one specifically. Somehow there but you can get granular if that ever happens. But probably the category is all you'll need there. All right, next up is Ben B. All right, Ben. Quiet leaving but not leaving. I am three weeks on from a client migrating away and still they haven't left. This sounds familiar. Despite following up for an update from them. No update has been received this week. While remaining professional and cordial. What do you recommend to bring this to a close? I've already made the mistake of canceling their subscription for the first of May. Okay. So what I would do been, and then the situation here is this client said they were leaving, and they still haven't moved their site off of your server. So often, this is a communication issue. And so I think when we chatted about this last, my suggestion was, you want a form to fill out for them to discontinue service on a certain date. And that's the date you turn off the website. So that you know that that solves a communication loop. What I would do in this situation since there's not a cancellation form that was used. I would email the client and say, We haven't we didn't bill you for this month because we said you were leaving. You know, we'll be happy we'll provide management service for the next seven days. But after this date, we will your website, hosting will be terminated and your website will be offline. Then is this the one that you're providing hosting. Okay, yeah, your host Okay, yeah. So just send them an email that says you know, on such and such a day, you have expressed interest that you were leaving. We weren't you weren't billed for May. On this date, we will be canceling website management service, which includes website hosting. At that point, your site will go offline if it has not been transferred away by your new provider. If you need more time for this, we'll be happy to we'll need to bill you for the month of May. That's how I would communicate to them. You got to give them a deadline or they they have no reason to move at this point. Yep. All right. Last but certainly not least, is Karen.\r\n\r\nOkay, since RSVP will most likely be obsolete soon. Um, I don't know about that. Most likely with PMP I think you'll be happy with that. Their support is fantastic. So I just buy it buy a license. It's not that expensive. Purchase the paid version for this. And you'll get their support which is next level good. I think you'll be happy with that\r\n\r\nYeah, yeah, it would be the client buying it you just roll that pricing in it's not terribly expensive. Yeah, if what they're getting the standard version is probably all you'd need. Yeah, 247 a year. It's done. Oh, it might be a bit expensive for her. I mean, get so you give her the you give her the two options. You know, we can if you want. We can build something simple but it's not going to have recurring memberships. Or if you want recurring memberships. That's something people charge for. So it just cost money. Yeah. I get it. Some clients swallow hard at 250 a year. It's a lot of times we have to play the role of educator of you know, if you want to make money, the software that makes you money costs money. It just is what it is. Yep. All right. That brings us to the one more.\r\n\r\nOkay, so Karen, this feels like a continuation of something but I'm not quite sure what this is in reference to he built a client site on Generate press he has a care plan marketing company added a book launch page in Beaver Builder, and other plugin I'd like to let him know that I'd like to be able to do the development so plugins won't conflict. Yeah, that's good. Okay, that's a that's good. So are you managing the site Karen? Okay, so whenever a marketing company wants a login for the site, and the client says hey, give these people log in. I have a standard conversation I have with the client. I remind them that in the contract they sign we are not responsible for any work, or problems that arise from the work of third parties such as SEO professionals, marketing firms like this. We are in I recommend that those people let you know they give us the work and we'll build it so that it works correctly with the site and we make the right technical choices. That's our job. That's what we do. So in this case, I would have that even if it's after the fact I would still have that same conversation with a client and just let them know Look, these folks added their page builder, which it's not it's not like they added some other page builder that you know, we've talked about today. They've added Beaver Builder, it's a solid plugin. That's what we use for most of our development. I like it a lot. I didn't say that, Stacy. And you know, they've added their plugin, which makes sense. It's their tool set and so forth. But it can conflict with what we've done here already on the site. So you know, I would recommend just for the long term health, you know, it's it's my job as your website management professional, to let you know, that for the long term health of your website, it's best that all this be done in one single tool. It's going to make the site easier to manage and more healthy long term, et cetera, et cetera. That's that's the kind of conversation I would have with them, if that makes sense.\r\n\r\nYeah, so But in that, and that's generally I'll have this point, this conversation at the point where the client asks us to hand over a login a privileged login to a third party company. Great. It's your website. Happy to win. I need to let you know. This. It's it's usually a pretty simple conversation. Oh, he gave them his login. Right? That's right. Why it's lovely. Yep. Yep. Okay, so does the client have an administrator login that's another thing. Generally, we give the client an editor login and an administrator login but in a break glass in case of emergency situation. And we'll even tell them look, if you if you're using an administrator login to make changes to your site or log in. We're not responsible for security issues that come from that like this. Is only this is like if we get hit by a bus, you've got the master keys to your website. There's no reason generally speaking, in most cases, that a client needs an administrator login to log into their website. If there's stuff they need access to, then you can generally give an editor role the capability that with WordPress capabilities to access what they need. But yeah, it's Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. And I might care 100% I agree, philosophically, the client needs to have an administrator login they just don't that doesn't need to be their only login, right? I mean, how many times if y'all anybody else here, like the client comes to you and they don't have they can't get to their website. Their developer has access. They don't have access. It's just a friggin nightmare. And the client owns the website. So just philosophically, I agree that the client needs to have the keys to the website, but they also need to understand that like, what they for the regular use of the website, and administrator login is for a WordPress expert, not a typical user. Anyway, I'm going to climb down off my soapbox now. I give them both Yep. All right, everybody. This has been fun. We sold a lot of stuff this hour and y'all got to hear some breaking news sort of from from the solid team. What I will tell you because David's gone, right, I'm gonna tell you is pretty darn cool. Pretty, pretty cool. I think you're gonna like what you see. Okay, that's gonna wrap us up for the week. Let me just pop open here. Let's look at the calendar view. Let me remind you what's coming up in the month of May. Again I am out the last two weeks of may. I will be on a 30th anniversary trip with my wife. Aside from we will do office hours on May the 24th. That is an odd day as you can see, out of our usual Kadence it will be a Friday. There on the 24th I will be able to do office hours that day. There is no premium course here as usual the last Tuesday, Wednesday of the month. However, we did just today at this live stream, the AI Plugin Creation workshop, which if you're a bit late, you might have missed this I'm going to drop in the link here. This is a two hour premium livestream, where we're going to be building that events plugin that I talked about several weeks ago on office hours with chat GPT meta box Gravity Forms we're going to build a bespoke events plugin which I've now used on a few sites and it works pretty darn well. Pretty nifty. So I'm going to show you how we build that and really, it's talk through the thought process of how do I solve a plugin, like creating a plugin problem using AI and some WordPress tools and how does that process look? So definitely a workshop. That's gonna be a lot of fun. That is next week. That is Wednesday of next week. So that's coming up pretty quick. So that's what's coming up here. I hope you have a great weekend. I hope you don't do any work at all. I hope you have a great time of rest and relaxation with your friends and family. I'll see you back here Tuesday for news roundup news roundup as a week earlier than normal because again, I'm gone. And but yeah, Tuesday's news roundup Wednesday, the AI plugin course. Thursday Office Hours next week. We'll see you back here on I iThemes Training. Again y'all. I did this last time. We are we what are we doing? Oh yes, we're solid Academy. See you back here on solid Academy where we go further together.\r\n\r\nTranscribed by https:\/\/otter.ai\r\n"}},"postCountOnPage":1,"postCountTotal":1,"postID":448505,"postFormat":"standard","geoCloudflareCountryCode":"US"}; dataLayer.push( dataLayer_content );
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