Category: WordPress

Either “name” or “item.name” should be specified (in “itemListElement”) error

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There are few different reasons to get this error but here is my case: It involved WordPress and Yoast SEO plugin. I suddenly received this error from google search console, it said:

“New Breadcrumbs structured data issues detected”

Top critical issues*
Either “name” or “item.name” should be specified (in “itemListElement”)

*Critical issues prevent your page or feature from appearing in Search results.

Now that sounds serious, right? Not have your site or page appear in Search results? Ouch!

One of the solutions for this is to go to WordPress settings -> Reading and then select a page for your homepage. This is where Yoast SEO will read the missing data.

But in my case I could not do this because there is no homepage, I use “Your latest posts” as a default “homepage”. So somehow this confused Yoaast SEO plugin (can also be other plugins). Luckily there was an easy fix within Yoast.

In WP admin select Yoast SEO -> Search Appearance then breadcrumbs tab and then find the Anchor text for the Homepage field. Fill it with anything you want, I used “Home”.

Save it and if needed wipe the site cache and the problem should be solved.

Keep in mind that this error can appear on any page that has this name tag empty. This solution is just for HOMEPAGE problem, because that is what Google search console told me: root URL had this problem. If you have the problem with specific subpages or posts then this will probably not solve your problem.

CSS files not refreshing on – wordpress / siteground

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If you have siteground hosting (could be the same for other hosts) and maybe WordPress site and you just edited a style.css file, reloaded your page but you cant see the changes (they appear after some time) then it is probably a Super Cacher issue.

Go to your siteground cpanel, find SuperCacher under Site Improvement Tools and click it.

Then find your domain, click Flush Cache then turn it Off.

Here is some more info:
The Static Cache option caches all static content on your account that includes images, CSS files, javascript, flash, and more. Once enabled, all requests of future visitors to your pages will be answered from the cached content and not directly from the server. If you just made changes to your website and want to see them live immediately, you could use the flush button to purge the cache on your account and not wait for the automatic server flush that happens over periods of a few hours.

So one approach you could use is this : turn off cache while you are editing the files (through FTP, not in wordpress admin) site. Once you are done just turn it on again.

WordPress Custom Fields missing in admin (post or page)

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This is a very specific problem so it might only work for some. After I updated WordPress and all plugins on an old site that used WordPress Custom Fields to enter some data, the Custom Fields in admin disappeared. I could add a new post but Custom Fields were nowhere to be sen, not even in the screen options.

Long story short, after doing some searching on the net, I found out it was ACF (Advanced Custom Fields) fault. In new version of the plugin they disable WordPress Custom Fields because they think you are using ACF anyway so no need for both. Not sure I agree but here is 2 ways you can try to solve it:

  1. If you activated ACF but are not using the plugin, just disable it.  WordPress Custom Fields should come back.
  2. If you want to keep both then add this code to your theme’s function.php file (the best is the child theme, if you have one)
    add_filter('acf/settings/remove_wp_meta_box', '__return_false');

WordPress Custom Fields should reappear now.

Global variable set in the template’s header.php is empty in footer.php

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If you set up a global variable in the header you would expect that it would be available everywhere, right? That is the definition of the word ‘global;, right? Well, it doesn’t work like this and the reason is because in WordPress header and footer are called via functions so the variable is only accessible in scope of each function.

One of the solutions is simple – use global variable before the declaration AND before echoing.

For example, add this to header.php:

<?php global $var; $var= "something"; ?>

and then in the footer.php you do this :

<?php global $var; echo $var; ?>

and it will echo the content of your $var variable.

Be advised though that some people say using global variables is not the best practice.

Fix “Failed to send your message. Please try later or contact administrator by other way.”

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I am using Contact Form 7 on one of WP sites and after update (not sure which one) I started getting this error after user submitted the form:

‘Failed to send your message. Please try later or contact administrator by other way.’

As always, lots of way to complicated solutions on the net when, in my case, the solution was simple.

This is what I had before (CF7 admin):
wrong mail contact form 7

And this is the one that works (I just replaced data in the FROM field):
correct mail form 7

of course you need to replace domain.com with your domain.

I do not know why did it worked before and why it stopped working but this is how I solved it. Of course you cant just hit reply now because your email is REPLY email. To solve this you can try this :

Contact Form 7 has a field called “Additional headers:”. Enter (literally) Reply-To: [your-email] and save.

WordPress not showing latest WP version available

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I wanted to update one of my WordPress sites from 4.2.2 to the latest but WordPress did not show me there is a new version available even though WordPress is already on version 4.3.

If this happens to you the first thing you should check is to see if there is this line in your wp-config.php file :

define( 'AUTOMATIC_UPDATER_DISABLED', true);

In my case it was, so I set it to false however it sadly didn’t resolve the issue.

If the same thing happens to you then I suggest you to install this awesome plugin (just look at the ratings):

WordPress Fence

It immediately found out that WordPress code files were modified by cPanel (most probably if you installed WP via your hosts cPanel), which added few lines to core files that prevent WordPress to show updates (something with incompatibility). Word Fence then offered a bulk replace and replaced these modified files with the clean WordPress core files. Refresh and WP immediately offered and found update to latest WP.

Get WordPress Post ID Outside the Loop

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It is easy to get a post ID in WordPress. To echo it on screen we write:

 <?php the_ID(); ?>

To store the ID into variable we use something like this : 

 $id = get_the_ID();

There is one caveat though: if you read the description on WordPress codex it says this in both cases: This tag must be within The Loop.

So if you ever wanted to retrieve or display the WordPress post ID in footer or header or outside of The Loop you might end up being disappointed because the ID returned is not the correct one (usually we always get the same id, most probably the last one?)

Now I am not going to go into technical details or why is that so here is the solution that worked for me. You 

$post = $wp_query->post;
echo $post->ID;

There are some other ways with global variables and some other but it seem it doesn’t work for everyone. This one worked on the first try. Let me know in comments if it doesn’t work for you.

Turn On Error Reporting on WordPress Blank / White Screen of Death

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There is nothing worse than getting blank screen when developing for WordPres – also ‘officially’ known as The White Screen of Death – because you have no idea what went wrong. No errors, nothing useful, just blank screen. It’s even worse when it just appears out of nowhere. This happened to me few times in the past and then just recently. Woke up in the morning and the entire site (not this one) displayed just blank white page.

First thing you should do is rename the plugins folder and see if it works. If yes then the problem is in one of the plugins so if your admin works start disabling plugins one by one. If admin doesn’t work then try renaming plugin folders via FTP. If this doesn’t help then rename the themes folder and see if the problem was caused by one of your theme.

This didn’t help in my case. So I went to WordPress site (link below) and insert the code they recommended! It STILL didn’t work and there were no errors displayed! So finally I modified the code a little and finally the error appeared! I don’k know why are they posting a solution that doesn’t display the errors.

Here is the code that started showing errors and I finally able to fix it. Still the mistery remains why did the blank screen start appearing when it was working just fine yesterday when I went to bed. Ah, the ‘joys’ of developing.

Open the wp-config.php file in the root directory of your worpress and insert this just above the /* That's all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */ comment. Refresh the WordPress and hopefully you will see PHP error telling you what went wrong. 

// Enable WP_DEBUG mode
define('WP_DEBUG', true);

// Enable Debug logging to the /wp-content/debug.log file
define('WP_DEBUG_LOG', true);

// Enable display of errors and warnings 
define('WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY', true);
error_reporting(E_ALL);
@ini_set("display_errors", 1);

// Use dev versions of core JS and CSS files (only needed if you are modifying these core files)
define('SCRIPT_DEBUG', true);

After you fix the error don’t forget to remove or at least comment the added code.

In case it didn’t work, here are some more steps to try to fix it:

Common WordPress Errors and Debugging in WordPress

Redirect all requests for the domain root to a specific page

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This is for WordPress but can be used in any site because it uses .htaccess.

I needed to redirect all visitors that visit the root URL (for example elcoderino.com) to specific subpage (eg elcoderino.com/subpage). WordPress allows you to create a static front page or select a custom page that will replace default front page content but in my case it just didn’t work. Maybe it was combination of Advanced Custom Fields or custom post types but it just kept messing up the front page.

So the solution is to add this to your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^$ /subpage/ [R=301,L]

if your .htaccess file already contains RewriteEngine On then simply just add RewriteRule ^$ /subpage/ [R=301,L] below it.

WordPress plugin Visual Editor Custom Buttons makes Visual Editor toolbar disapear

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I wanted to add custom buttons to WordPress editor so I installed Visual Editor Custom Buttons, made a new button (it’s really easy and intuitive) but when I wanted to create new post or page I encountered a problem: Visual Editor toolbar completely disappeared.

Long story short, plugin creates a new javascript file (button-1-1.js, …) every time you add a new button. The javascript file is created in the plugins js folder (it will most probably be wp-content/plugins/visual-editor-custom-buttons/js). The problem was that plugin somehow fails to write (insufficient permissions) to this folder so it is unable to create these files. After you created a new button you should open the aforementioned js folder and check if there are files named similar to button-1-1.js. If not then this could be the problem. You will most probably need to delete and add the button again after you change the permissions of folder js to 777.

The solution was to simply change folder permissions to 777 with FTP program (FileZilla : right click on folder and select File Permissions… option)