SOLVED: Upgrading to php 7 wp-rss-multi-importer/inc/excerpt_functions.php on line 570

SOLVED: Upgrading to php 7 wp-rss-multi-importer/inc/excerpt_functions.php on line 570

/in , /by

I recently got an email from an old client because one of plugins was giving them an error and stopped working breaking their site. After taking a quick look I determined the issue was due to php depreciation.

Below is the error they were receiving:

  wp-content/plugins/wp-rss-multi-importer/inc/excerpt_functions.php on line 570

How to fix this:

I fixed it for me the following way:
1) Go to /wp-content/plugins/wp-rss-multi-importer/
2) Open editor on excerpt_functions.php
3) Go to line 570
4) Change first occurrence of $thisLink to $thisLink1 (you are only adding a number at the end)

wp-content/plugins/wp-rss-multi-importer/inc/excerpt_functions.php on line 570
wp-content/plugins/wp-rss-multi-importer/inc/excerpt_functions.php on line 570

After the change is done and saved, make sure you activate the plugin and everything should come back to normal. The feed will show the original content as it was before.

Any questions let me know on the comment below.

Network Solutions – WordPress Security Update

/in , /by

Network solutions has issues this email about their WordPress security update: 

As you may be aware, there are ongoing attacks against WordPress across the world. Attempts are made frequently by criminals to gain control over your WordPress blog and to then use that for their own illegal purposes. Your best protection is to make sure you maintain your WordPress installation at the latest release version and to ensure that you use a complex password that is not easily guessed. 

Why this update? 

Criminals are inventive and resourceful. Right now they are using the longstandingpingback feature in WordPress to create distributed denial of service attacks (DDOS) against third party websites. There is a high probability that your website might be used for such an attack unless you take specific action to disable pingbacks. 

What should you do? 

The recommended action is to simply install install this plugin if you use version 3.5 or later. 

More information can be found about this sort of attack on Brian Kreb’s web site. 

Or by visiting Sucuri Security’s blog posting on the subject: More Than 162,000 WordPress Sites Used for Distributed Denial of Service Attack. 

I am not an expert, where do I get help? 

If you aren’t technical (and most of us aren’t) then we would suggest you contact the person responsible for building your WordPress blog and ask them for assistance. Alternatively, you could contact NS customer service team who would be glad to assist you. 

Using Wordpress as Your Business Website

Using WordPress as Your Business Website

/in , , , , /by
Using WordPress as Your Business Website

Should your business website use WordPress?
Every so often we get asked whether to use WordPress framework as the primary content management system versus going with a different platform. WordPress is very powerful and there are many great plugins out there to make your website very dynamic. However, with being so popular(open source) there are also some disadvantages since everyone can get their hands on and view the source code. This poses a security loophole since the bad guys can exploit the vulnerabilities and hack your website in just a few minutes.

So is it safe to use is it for your business ? 
Sure, but all the security vulnerabilities  should be taken care of before going live since WordPress is  out of the box software and there are some security features that need to be enabled or disabled. Having a bullet proof WordPress website is not as easy as you have to take into consideration also your web hosting environment whether its shared or private. More on WordPress hosting here.

Most of the WordPress will get hacked at least once. Its a known fact. Ask anyone who has used WordPress for at least 5 years, they will tell you their hacking experience. Its not fun and its a pain for those who do not know php and MySQL.

So before you decide whether to use WordPress as your business website keep in mind the “security” aspect of this open source framework as it will save you a lot of time and headache.

Let us know if you have any questions about wordpress

WordPress Ecommerce Tip #2

/in , , /by

Change wording in your shopping cart.
Most all of the “text” on the site that involves the shopping cart can be found in the language file here:
“wp-content/plugins/wp-shopping-cart/languages/EN_en.php”. In that file you will find everything from “Visit the Shop” to “PnP” (which most like to change to “Shipping”) to the sentence that reads on the checkout page about “having your credit card handy”. You can change these phrases to whatever you’d like, but just remember that when editing this text that you leave the quotes in place, otherwise your site will break!
So here’s an example…I want to remove the words “Visit the Shop” from my sidebar shopping cart. So I locate the line in the language file (it’s on line 174):

define('TXT_WPSC_VISITTHESHOP', 'Visit the Shop');

I would then change it to this: 

define('TXT_WPSC_VISITTHESHOP', '');

And you notice that I left in the quotes, but removed the text. That’s it for changing or removing text.

WordPress Ecommerce Tip #1

/in , , /by

Change the “add to cart” button that appears on your shopping cart.
Well, first you’ll want to make sure that you choose “ecommerce” for your theme in “Shop Settings”. That will place an actual button on your cart.
Then to change that image, you will navigate to “wp-content/plugins/wp-shopping-cart/themes/ecommerce/images”. In that directory you will see a “add_to_cart.gif” and you will replace that with whatever “add to cart” button you’d like. Step 2 of this process is to adjust the stylesheet so that it will reflect the correct image size of the new image you’ve uploaded (unless of course, the new image is the same size as the old; then you can stop here).

Locate “ecommerce.css” and find the following code:

input.wpsc_buy_button{
background-image: url(images/add_to_card.gif);
border: none;
width: 80px;
height: 30px;
}

You will then change the width and height to reflect the size of your new image. Save and upload and you’re all done

How to fix WordPress “500 Internal Server error” page

/in , , , , /by

How to fix WordPress "500 Internal Server error" page
How to fix WordPress “500 Internal Server error” 

You maybe getting this error page due to a server issue rather than WordPress configuration. So do not change or delete anything in your WordPress yet as it may not be related to your WP installation at all.

In order to solve this issue lets first look at what the “500 Errors” actually mean. Basically the 500 Internal Server Error is quite a common HTTP status code that indicates something is not working properly on the web-site’s server but the server itself could not tell you what the exact problem is. The WordPress 500 internal server error its just like any other web page that shows up in your browser window.

Now that we know know what the “500 Internal Server Error” is we can look at WordPress in relation to this error.

1. Try deleting your .htaccess as your permalinks might not work, but you’ll at least know whether this is being caused by an error in htaccess.

2. I deletion of .htaccess did not work the re-upload it and add the following:
SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off

3. Increase the server memory in php.ini file for example from 64m to 128m

4. If you have changed the prefix of your MySQL database tables manually this can also affect it so revert back to your previous tables.

5. If you have just moved to another server/hosting and your php version is old try adding this to your .htaccess file: AddType x-mapp-php5 .php

6. Disable your brower-cache then quit tour browser then open it again and see what happens. This one is pretty straight forward.

7. Check your file permissions as some server will behave better if you set your permissions to chmod 777 instead of chmod 755 – as strange as it sounds.

8. Some people have had issues with GoDaddy WP-Cache plugin so my suggestion is to remove WP-Cache and install another plugin like WP-SuperCache or Hyper Cache.

Solution to error “wp-includes template-loader.php on line ..”

/in , , /by

Ever gotten this type of error ?
wp-includes template-loader.php on line 26 or 43

Regardless of the number after the “on line” its a very common issue with WordPress due to template or plugin installations.

Here are some simple solutions to this error:

Firstly, deactivate all of your active/inactive plugins (and yes, all) just temporarily to narrow down the issue list. After having done this and the error goes away, re-activate them individually (one-by-one) to find the buggy plugin(s). If you are not able to login into your admin dashboard, try re-setting the plugins folder with your favorite FTP client or phpMyAdmin. Every now and then, an allegedly inactive plugin can still cause errors-problems because the php hooks remain unless plugins have been completely uninstalled/removed or some plugins hang around in cached folder. So when you rename the plugin the folder, you break them and force them to become inactive). If applicable, also remember to deactivate any other plugins in the old-plugins folder. Probably, the easiest and simplest way is to rename that folder to inactive-plugins-old, however its totally up to you the name as it wont make any difference.

Secondly, switching to the un-changed default theme (e.g Twenty Eleven template) for a moment by renaming your current theme’s folder in wp-content/themes. The idea is to force WordPress to go back to the default theme to exclude any theme-related issue. This basically check to see if anything is wrong with your custom theme. If you still don’t have access to your admin dashboard, then access your server via FTP or shell connection or whatever file management application your hosting company provides.

Third, if the above troubleshooting steps have been exhausted and do not resolve the issue, try manually re-uploading all files and folders EXCEPT the wp-config.php file and the /wp-content/ directory from a fresh download of WordPress. This method will replace your core files without changing your content and settings in wp-config.php file and the /wp-content/ directory. Note – make sure you do not overwrite the highlighted files as that will misconfigure the database settings and it will create more work than needed.
If all fail then feel free to contact us to do this for you !

SOLVED: Error establishing a database connection WordPress

/in , , /by

For anyone who is getting “Error establishing a database connection” the solution is very simple . If you know how to use a FTP client like Filezilla you can login in and check to see if the wp-config.php file exists (see Figure 1). Your server/hosting panel might also have a file browser editor you can use to check. This file will be in the root directory where your WordPress is installed in.

SOLVED: Error establishing a database connection WordPress
WordPress root directory in FileZilla – Figure 1 

Solution: 
If this is a new WordPress installation use the file wp-config-sample.php and add your database username and password credentials and save the file as wp-config.php.

If the file is there and you have already added your database credentials find the line:

define( ‘WP_DEBUG’, false); and change false to true then re-save it.

This will give you a more specific error telling you either your username or password is wrong or it can’t connect to the database host. This will determine the next steps that need to be taken.

Solved: WordPress Website Is Loading Very Slow – What to do?

/in , , , , /by
If you ever had any issues with WordPress running very slow and people calling you to tell you they cant see your website, you may not be the only one. WordPress is a such a great frame work but its code complexity does not cooperate well with some servers.

We had a client come to us last week and asked us to analyze their WordPress based website as it was acting very slow. Our initial approach was to dig in and see the back-end first before making any changes. We did find some unnecessary plugins that were taking a tall on the load time but was not very significant however that always helps. After other tweaking and code optimization we decided to move their content, images, javascript, CSS files to content deliver network (CDN) for faster loading. And that did it, the site load decreased by 3.9 seconds. We also did some MySQL database optimization which had so many unused tables that were inserted by previous plugins even though they were un-installed the tables were still there. This happens quite a bit especially for sites that have had WordPress since the early days and the framework wasnt as advanced as it is today. If you need any help with speeding up your WordPress site please drop us a line and we will be happy to help you.