[Nick]

Could it be related to this issue here, perhaps? https://wordpress.org/support/topic/explanation-and-workaround-for-error-404-on-category-pagination?replies=10

If you set Settings > Reading > Blog pages show at most to "1", does the problem go away? http://d.pr/i/1334r

[Nick]

Have you tried flushing the WordPress rewrite rules by going to Settings > Permalinks and clicking the "Save Changes" button? Sometimes that is required to get pagination to work with custom post types.

[Nick]

You can still style the custom background by adding the following CSS to your stylesheet at /wp-content/themes/news-pro/style.css:

body.custom-background {
	background-size: cover;
}

Hope that helps!

[Nick]

Try adding define( 'WP_DEBUG_LOG', true ); to your wp-config.php file to see if any errors are written to wp-content/debug.log when you save the theme options.

[Nick]

You could try removing those entries from the options table (but back up your database first!), and then resave the theme options in the WP admin area to see if/how the settings reappear.

[Nick]

Sorry to hear that. It's probably worth installing the theme in a dev environment (like the Bitnami WordPress stack). If the theme options work there without any plugins, you may have to reinstall WordPress on your live server from scratch and gradually re-introduce all plugins and content. Sorry not to be able to offer a happier solution for you!

[Nick]

Some other ideas to check before you test that a change to the theme isn't the cause (it's a good idea to back everything up before you try these):

1. Check that a JavaScript error isn't preventing form submission on the options page. (View the console in Chrome Developer Tools, and test in other browsers.) It could be a JavaScript issue caused by a faulty WP install or browser plugin.
2. Try renaming the theme folder to "magazine" instead of "magazine_10", then deactivate and reactivate the theme. You may want to back up the widget areas using this plugin before you do that, and make a note of existing Theme Options.
3. Try reinstalling WordPress using the "Re-install Now" button on the Dashboard > Updates page

[Nick]

If you take the theme only and install it on a completely clean version of WordPress elsewhere, does the theme options page work?

[Nick]

It's possible that there's a conflict with a plugin you've installed recently. Have you tried deactivating plugins to see if the theme options work again?

[Nick]

Great to hear that worked! Happy to help.

[Nick]

Hi Pavle

I've just installed the Genesis Sample theme and Yoast SEO and ticked the “Noindex subpages of archives“ box, and I'm seeing the <meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow"/> tag as expected in the source of blog subpages:

Are you creating the blog page by going to Settings > Reading and setting the Posts page to “Blog”?

If, instead, you are using the “Blog” template that Genesis provides, then this explains why the noindex meta is not appearing on that page – I believe that Yoast SEO only adds the noindex to ”archive” pages, which would exclude the blog page template. If you set the blog page by using the Settings > Reading option instead of using the Blog template (i.e. change the template for the blog page back to “Default Template” after changing the Settings > Reading option), you will find that the meta robots tag starts to appear on your /blog/page/2 pages and that Google will exclude them.

[Nick]

The pages you link to are not category pages – they are the subpages of the blog archive. That's why checking the “noindex, follow” box in the category settings page has no effect on those pages.

If you want to prevent the subpages of archives from being indexed by Google, you can go to SEO > Titles & Meta and check the “Noindex subpages of archives” checkbox:

Then, after Google recrawls your site, the /blog/page/2 pages will no longer be indexed by Google.

[Nick]

It looks like the closing </a> tag is being output correctly, but perhaps not where you expected it to be. If I view source on that page, copy it, and tidy the formatting up with “Reformat Code” in PhpStorm (screenshot: http://d.pr/i/2NmJ ), I can see that the opening <a> tag gets generated inside the gfwa-container-div immediately after the linked image, while the closing </a> tag is generated immediately before the closing </article> tag for that widget.

The link is therefore wrapping an irregular section of your HTML – it wraps the post-info and entry-title blocks, and it wraps the closing gfwa-container-div tag. But it doesn't wrap the entire contents of the article element (the image and the opening gfwa-container-div tag). Was that what you intended, or should it be wrapping the entire contents of the article element? If you intended to wrap the entire contents, you could try editing the first action to give it a higher priority so that it executes earlier in an attempt to output your opening <a> before any other content the plugin attaches to that hook. i.e.:

add_action ( 'gsfc_before_post_content', 'gfwa_add_html_markup_inside_loop', 1 );

If that doesn't work out, you might find that you have better control over the output by dropping the Genesis Sandbox Featured Content Widget and using a simple custom page template with a custom loop instead – I think you'd be able to achieve your current layout using a custom page template without too much stress (but feel free to try and ask back here if you still need help).

[Nick]

Good for you for sticking with it! I think everyone has days (weeks? months?) when they feel like throwing in the towel. Once you get your head around Genesis, though, it's a good way to get WordPress sites up and running pretty quickly.

In regards to theme recommendations – if I were starting a site to showcase short fiction (and it just so happens that I am!), I'd consider Daily Dish or Foodie if the site was blog-orientated, and Centric Pro, Epik, or Modern Portfolio if I wanted to push my products first and foremost and include a blog as a subpage (like Chuck Wendig now does).

Of the four themes I list, it sounds like Daily Dish or Modern Portfolio might work for what you're planning – both are clean, have space for a custom header, and room for calls to action and ads – but these things are very personal.

It's a shame that WordPress' custom header enforces a fixed height and width, because it makes it more fiddly for WordPress users to add a header that's different to the prescribed size. Do feel free to shout up if you get stuck, though.

[Nick]

When you use the Chrome Developer Tools, Chrome looks for a JavaScript sourcemap file for any minified JavaScript files included in your page. Sourcemaps are designed to help you debug minified JavaScript – they are purely a debugging tool designed to help you find problems with compressed JavaScript files; they're not needed for essential functions on the site.

The error won't affect regular visitors – they won't even see it unless they open Developer Tools in Chrome – so it's not something you should be worried about, but you can clear those errors if you wish by disabling JavaScript source maps in Chrome:

1. Open the Developer Tools panel with View > Developer > Developer Tools
2. Click the grey cog in the top right of the Developer Tools bar.
3. Uncheck “Enable JavaScript Source maps”

Then close the options panel, refresh the page, and that error will not appear. If you never use Chrome to debug minified JavaScript, then this is the best option for you if you don't like to see errors related to min.map files when you work with Developer Tools.

The alternative would be to ask the Genesis core dev team to generate and include the superfish.min.map file in the lib/js/menu/ folder in a future release, but that's probably not necessary, as Genesis is starting to move away from Superfish anyway.

[Nick]

The Genesis Sample theme is a sample child theme. It's designed to show you how to install and modify a simple child theme. If you were building a new site from scratch, you could start with the Genesis Sample theme. (The Metro Pro theme is also a child theme, in case you weren't sure – it's just been more heavily modified.)

All Genesis themes, including the sample theme, are covered by the same GPL licence; you can build off them and redistribute them, just as you can with WordPress plugins and WordPress itself. You just need to be sure that you aren't infringing on any trademarks in the process.

[Nick]

From the source code, it looks as if your developer has edited the Genesis theme itself to customise the site instead of creating a child theme and making the customisations there. As you suspected, that's why your site gets reverted to the default look if you try to update Genesis – the Genesis update overwrites the Genesis folder, which currently includes all of your theme modifications.

This is a mistake your developer has made – you should ask them to re-implement their customisations as a Genesis child theme or look for another developer to help out if they prove unwilling to make those changes. (A good developer will be able to compare the changes your original team made to the Genesis theme and recreate your theme as a child theme, which would allow you to update Genesis safely in the future.)

The sidebar areas you mention can be renamed, but the names are currently hard-coded into your theme. You should ask your developer to give them more useful names and add a description to each sidebar area. (As well as a title, the sidebar areas can hold a short description to remind you where they will appear on the site.)

[Nick]

The child themes in the StudioPress theme shop are all unique themes – they were not created using another theme as a starting point. As such, it's unlikely that your modification of Metro Pro would be accepted into the shop, if that's what you were asking.

Under the GPL Licence that WordPress and StudioPress themes use, you are allowed to distribute the modified version of your theme from your own site, though. If you do that, it would be best to remove all mentions of “Metro Pro” from the theme's source code and directory structure (i.e. give your modified theme a new name and screenshot), and perhaps say that it's “based on Metro Pro by StudioPress” to credit the original authors.

[Nick]

When you use the Chrome Developer Tools, Chrome tries to locate a JavaScript sourcemap file for any minified JavaScript files included in your page. Sourcemaps are designed to help you debug minified JavaScript – they are purely a debugging tool designed to help you find problems with compressed JavaScript files; they're not needed for essential functions on the site.

The error won't affect regular visitors – they won't even see it unless they open Developer Tools in Chrome – so it's not something you should be worried about, but you can clear those errors if you wish by disabling JavaScript source maps in Chrome:

1. Open the Developer Tools panel with View > Developer > Developer Tools
2. Click the grey cog in the top right of the Developer Tools bar.
3. Uncheck “Enable JavaScript Source maps”

Then close the options panel, refresh the page, and that error will not appear. If you never use Chrome to debug minified JavaScript, then this is the best option for you if you don't like to see errors related to min.map files when you work with Developer Tools.

The alternative would be to ask the Genesis core dev team to generate and include the superfish.min.map file in the lib/js/menu/ folder in a future release, but that's probably not necessary, as Genesis is starting to move away from Superfish anyway.

[Nick]

When you use the Chrome Developer Tools, Chrome tries to find a JavaScript sourcemap file for any minified JavaScript files included in your page. Sourcemaps are designed to help you debug minified JavaScript – they are purely a debugging tool designed to help you find problems with compressed JavaScript files; they're not needed for essential functions on the site.

The error won't affect regular visitors – they won't even see it unless they open Developer Tools in Chrome – so it's not something you should be worried about, but you can clear those errors if you wish by disabling JavaScript source maps in Chrome:

1. Open the Developer Tools panel with View > Developer > Developer Tools
2. Click the grey cog in the top right of the Developer Tools bar.
3. Uncheck “Enable JavaScript Source maps”

Then close the options panel, refresh the page, and that error will not appear. If you never use Chrome to debug minified JavaScript, then this is the best option for you if you don't like to see errors related to min.map files when you work with Developer Tools.

The alternative would be to ask the Genesis core dev team to generate and include the superfish.min.map file in the lib/js/menu/ folder in a future release, but that's probably not necessary, as Genesis is starting to move away from Superfish anyway.

[Author]

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