Just to be clear, was your site broken by the plugin, or were you just not sure how to configure it? If it was the former, then perhaps thereâs something that needs fixing.
Both. At first, it wasnât loading parts of my site when the site ran perfect right until I installed plugin.
Am I able to use the theme Iâve always used or is that specific blog theme necessary?
Which parts of the site? If you could elaborate that would be helpful, to make sure it doesnât happen again.
Whatâs the theme youâve always used?
I use a heavily modified version of âïž Discourse Air Theme (lots of CSS changes) with a dark pallete. Basically, whatâs the point of the blog theme itself when I already use a theme on my forums/site? Is it needed or no?
Because I also see a Themes section in the plugin itself so Iâm confused:
Also, the last step on your siteâs guide says, âIn the Landing Pages Administration UI change the category of the âBlogâ page to whatever category you want to use to run your blog.â but Category is greyed out for me.
I was just in Admin panel, installed plugin, refreshed Panel and like half the site got wiped out. Not sure if it was still just trying to load it all or what.
Yes, you can use the Air Theme. Keep in mind that there will be some different HTML elements in the blog landing pages. You can read more on this in the pluginâs documentation which @Arkshine helpfully linked to, and is linked in the OP. See this topic in particular:
If you have more questions on that front, you can respond there.
Does the page have a âparentâ page?
What pages on the site were wiped out?
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So, if I choose Blog or Blog Post, category stays greyed out. I have 2 categories on my site: Forums and now Blog. Was I supposed to make Blog a sub-category with Forum as the parent?
Still a little confused on the theme thing. Is my entire forums site supposed to be Blog Landing theme, or only on the plugin? Like, if I want to use my modified version of Air, can I keep Air as my forums theme and then just set Blog Landing theme in plugin settings? Iâd hate to have to re-make my entire theme.
I also canât seem to figure out how to make âforums.mysite.comâ the landing page. I would like if people got to the landing page by visiting my forums URL. I also canât change my path at all?
It was literally just half of the site gone. Iâm thinking it mightâve been my site still loading up, though, maybe not the plugin itself.
It does not sound like the plugin broke your site. Please follow up with specific questions in the documentation topics covering what youâre asking.
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Oh, the irony. See what someone there just told me:
So is it âmaintainedâ or not? From talking here, it seems it is. From there, it seems itâs not. Seems like everyone isnât on the same page. All I really even need help with now is figuring out why there seems to be a lot of errors in the default HTML on the plugin (shown in the post I linked) and why the Subscribe section is all messed up by default, as well as a random click-able box that does nothing (the Subscribe function does nothing when clicked either).
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Hey, @45thj5ej, just chiming in to mention that the plugin itself is still maintained (Iâm helping with that myself), but neither the blog pages nor the blog theme have been updated in a few years.
Iâll take a look as soon as I can to try making them compatible with the latest version of the plugin. In the meantime, you could manually create a landing page with your preferred theme and layout and use your own code to display e.g. forum topics as blog entries.
Thanks for the reply! Yeah, I saw on the GitHub itâs been like 3+ years for those. I know you might have a bias since youâre helping maintain it, but did those go neglected because thereâs better options for a blog-style landing page or whatâs the deal with that whole thing?
This would be an immense help. If needed, I can provide my findings of what gives errors, how things arenât displaying right, etc. etc. And thatâs all off of the out-of-the-box default settings. Very excited about this. Any timeframe?
But here are the main issues in a video.
Subscribe info is weirdly in bottom-left corner with a super long Submit button at very bottom of screen. Subscribe button on bottom-right does nothing. Has awkward checkbox next to it. Finally, an invisible box that glows when hovered over that does nothing, but is clickable.
@cabidop ?
In addition to my above reply (havenât heard back from ya yet), the URL scheme will need to be changed too. At the moment, the blog page tries to link to the forum topic created for it, but the URL schemes donât match, so you always get a broken page.
Example:
The link it tries to take you to is
https://forums.mysite.me/b/blog-test-one-millionbut that URL never existed because the moment I created this topic on the forums, its URL is:
https://forums.mysite.me/t/blog-test-one-million/20
So somehow, the blog pages needs to replace the /b/ with /t/ and somehow get the number at the end that it generates. The /b/ is the username of the author. So itâs trying to link to:
https://forums.mysite.me/author/topictitle instead of:
https://forums.mysite.me/t/topictitle/randomnumber
Hi again, @45thj5ej, Iâve sent a few updates to the three repositories (this plugin and both the Blog Landing theme and pages) so the issues you mentioned in your video should be fixed once they are merged (usually within a few days).
Regarding your post about the URLs, the path is not /author/topictitle but /blogpath/topictitle, where blogpath is the path setting in the âBlogâ parent page (which looks like itâs /b in your case). What you see is intended, as if the âBlog Postâ page itâs properly configured (default settings should be enough) it will render the topic as a blog post with that URL. If after the updates you still see a broken page let me know, it might be a permissions issue or an incompatibility with another plugin.
And as why the blog pieces were neglected I canât say for sure as I joined fairly recently, but given your questions and other topics related to them I can guess that theyâre difficult to maintain to fulfil the expectations of every user regarding the functionality of a blog (while itâs much simpler for a landing page).
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Hey, thanks a ton for the update! Looks like theyâre merged as of 5hrs ago. So, how do I update the Landing Pages plugin itself? I originally forked it to my own GitHub, I just now synched the fork with the updated stuff, but when I click on Pull in the plugin settings, I get the image below and the âlearn moreâ link just takes me to the homepage of the authorâs site instead of actual helpful info that would actually help me âlearn moreââŠ
EDIT: Looks like you can go to https://forums.mysite.me/admin/upgrade and update stuff there, however, this isnât updating my actual blog pages thing. It shows my old HTML stuff on the plugin page and still gives that name error above.
EDIT2: So, I went and just manually updated the code stuff (would still like an answer for my above question, though) and the blog post page now looks like thisâŠrepeats the background image, colors are off, weird button placements, etc. Also, the Subscribe button still does nothing when clicked on any page. And on mobile, the hamburger menu thatâs there does nothing still either.
That being said, it looks like that awkward smaller grey box is fine if the blog post has enough text content. So maybe a fix somehow for blogs that are short? Example of longer post layout:
Still does weird tile background thing, though. And I unfortunately had to do a lot of CSS customization so it didnât look like the above photo, color-wise.
Oh, also just now noticed that the link breaks on mobile but works fine on Desktop when clicking a blog title on the blog landing page.
Desktop properly takes you to:
https://forums.mysite.me/blogpath/topic-title
Mobile takes you to:
https://forums.mysite.me/blogpath/blogpath/topic-title -
adding a second /blogpath/ for some reason.
A final thing (for now) also: Since updating the Landing Pages plugin, my GitHub repository now wonât connect when I do âTest Connectionâ and Pull is greyed out.
EDIT3: Another thing I just now found: If I make a new topic to be a blog post, the dates of all the previous blogs get changed to the most recent one. Thatâs not good at all. I made a new topic/blog post and they all changed to the date of the new one (todayâs date):
For the questions/issues that are related to the blog component exclusively, letâs move them to the Landing Pages Blog topic to keep this one focused on the plugin only. In any case, for what I can see the problem itâs mainly that the theme (which is very basic) doesnât fit your use case, and seeing that you already have updated it looks like itâs more on your side to keep adjusting it to your specific needs (the default should be âgood enoughâ after the update). I might put some additional time on it, but as mentioned it has been unmaintained for a while and itâs not really my main focus.
On your initial issue, the name already exists error usually happens either when recreating a page manually or when resetting the remote repository while keeping the pages. Either way the solution is just to remove the existing pages and syncing again.
On your issue with the âTest Connectionâ, the last plugin update now takes both the URL and the branch for the validation so make sure the data you input is correct (assuming that your fork is https://github.com/nomadtown/blog-landing-pages I have no issues testing it with the master branch).
OK, made a post there: Landing Pages Blog đ© - #42 by 45thj5ej
I wouldnât say fits âmyâ needs. The functionality out of the box is broken (the Subscribe button doesnât work, the hamburger menu on mobile does nothing, the blog links being broken on mobile, every blog date updates when a new one is made, etc).