How to correct error in customized posttype WP site
-
Hi folks
Can anybody help me. I foolishly, dogedly followed a Lynda.com tutorial for developing an 'online portfolio in WP'. Little did I know that my initial assumption - to use the 'twenty twelve' rather than the 'twenty eleven' theme would land me in such deep water.
I was attempting to learn php on my own. All went well, until, --- the index page for the customized post type.
Now I have two beautiful customized posttypes, 'companies' 'coverage' and no idea how to create an index page for either. I can't do the next step! I have tried every permutation - changing the permalink settings, changing them back, desperately searching for any handle to the nebulous links within the menu section. The only thing I can do (and have done for now) is to link the menu item 'company' and the menu item 'coverage' to a single post. Then the poor visitor has to scroll through the posts individually.
I tried contacting the tutor and Lynda.com, to no avail! I have searched forums and found this is a common problem, but because I am so confused and novice to php they might as well be speaking Chinese.
To compound my problems, looking through 'Wordpress SEO' for Yoast, I am painfully aware I can't go to the first basic step and fix the peramilinks to 'Postname' as that just makes my flakey menu collapse like a pack of cards.
Help!
-
Thank you Dan:)
I'll do as you advise.
-
I forgot to mention WordPress has a really good forum where there may be someone who can help you more directly http://wordpress.org/support/
-
Hi Catherine!
At this stage I think your best bet is to reach out to someone who can assist you directly, as it's a little tricky to work out the troubleshooting in the Q&A. You could contact Geoff (from Distilled) who is the person who developed the plugin http://geoffkenyon.com/ or I'm not sure if you know of any developers who could help with the technical stuff? Moz has a really good list of recommended companies as well! http://moz.com/community/recommended
-Dan
-
Well - at the moment I just have list of the of titles under the page title and txt (see attached url) - what I'd like to do is make it more like http://sugarrae.com/reviews/ - with image and some of the post's text. I've no idea how to go about achieving this.
I do know to get the plugin to work I had to set 'the page template for category pages' to 'Front Page'.
Sorry if I'm being dim!
Thanks for replying
Catherine
-
Catherine
When you say customize, what sort of things would you like to do with it?
-Dan
-
Hello Dan
I have finally managed to get near to the examply you posted. I've failed totally to find any help documentation however and so for my test site 'www.seoherts.co.uk' I've got a test customized category page minus anything other than the titles.
Could you be even kinder and direct me to some help for customizing the plugin? You help has really been amazing, you actually helped me back out of a corner. Now I'm nearly home an dry.
Thanks Dan
-
Let us know how it goes!
-
Ahh, it took me two weeks, but you could be right....
I probably would have been better off talking to you before I started!
That's what comes of teaching yourself. I'll give it a try tomorrow. Will let you know - and thanks again Dan!
I will have to give up the Recent 'Coverage' Recent 'Companies' list in the footer (which I was rather proud of!)
Catherine
-
Hi Catherine
Really sorry to hear there's still trouble with it
I see what you mean, the custom posttypes have their own categories apart from the normal blog categories? Can you scrap the custom posttypes and create the categories as normal?
-Dan
-
Hello Dan
I did as you suggested and got the options for categories of my 'blog'. The problem is that I've got these posttypes with their own categories. I'm probably asking too much of the plugin - but it doesn't give me the option to set up a page template with these as it doesn't recognise they exist. I seem to have lost them deep down in WP...
-
Hi Catherine
Thanks for the additional details and site name (being able to see the site helps). Unfortunately as a Moz Associate we are not able to accept account information - but I think I can help you anyway with what you provided.
Is all you are trying to do is have a "customized category archive"? For example, "Coverage" is a category with blog posts in it, and you want to customize that page so it's unique and has additional info?
For example, this page is a category, but it is customized and you see the list of posts below: http://sugarrae.com/reviews/
If so, all you need is this fairly new plugin WordPress Custom Categories. I think that may get you what you need without any custom coding etc. Let us know!
-Dan
-
Thank you David
I will try again, but I have told them three times over the course of three months. I was told to first contact the tutor, which I did. I got no response! I contacted them again two more times and got no response at all!
-
Hello Dan
Would it be ok for me to send you the login details? I'm finding it hard to explain because as I was lead by the nose by the tutorial I was a little lost in the woods in the process.
What I was aimming to achieve was to create two additional dynamic content pages i.e. 'companies' and 'coverage'. My client and old friend is successfully getting new businesses and national coverage for them on a daily basis! The 'online portfolio tutorial' on lynda.com appeared to meet the need.
In the tutorial (using twenty eleven) the tutor takes you through setting up two different posttypes, 'recipes' and 'one other, I've forgotten now'. I basically followed doggedly setting up these two seperate posttypes and ended up with 'companies' and 'coverage' which actually do work.
The problem came when I tried to display these as a list - as you do with a blog page. In the tutorial you simply had to change the default permalinks, then somehow magically the option to select the url for this illusive list appeared in the Menu option. This doesn't happen when you follow the same set of operations in twenty twelve, and I know it is to do with a change in function somehwere in the php. As I don't really understand php to this level I ended up with a terrible fudge as you will see at www.maxwellcomms.com.
If it is appropriate and if you are able to help would you like me to send you login details? I will totally understand if you think it's too big and ask.
I have tried hard to get help from Lynda.com but they only insisted I contact the tutor, he didn't respond! Ahh....
-
Catherine
Hi! I'd like to offer some suggestions, but second the request for a little more info or screenshots etc? By index page, do you mean an archive page listing all of the posts in each category?
Thanks!
-Dan
-
I'm not sure what you mean by "index page." Do you mean a static front page like the index.html page in a regular website? If so, that is set using the Settings==> Reading Panel. However, you can only use one static front page. You may be able to customize the content of the index page by using PHP to call different content in response to a given condition.
Also, I am a Lynda user. The best thing to do is contact Lynda directly. They are good about responding. It sounds like the issue is that the tutorial is outdated, which is usually something that they want to know about.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How does Google rank a "Site:yourexamplesite.com" Query
Hi All, Sorry for the potentially confusing title. I am trying to find out how google ranks the pages of your site when you search "site:yourwebsite.com". When I did this with my website I was surprised what pages showed up on the first page, there were sub-category pages in the top 5 results and top level category pages that weren't on the first page. I have been unable to find information as to how google returns these results, is it the same algorithm/factors that make pages rank highly in a regular search, or does it have something to do with how recently google crawled these pages. Any feedback would be helpful. Additionally, if anyone has worked through a similar scenario I would be interested to know if there were any insights you gained from finding out which of your pages google returned first. Thanks for the help! Jason
Web Design | | Jason-Reid0 -
What is the Estimated Time for SERP Rankings to Replenish after a Site Redesign?
Hello Fellow Moz'ers, My company's website, www.1099pro.com, is currently OLD and not mobile-friendly! However, we rank #1 for out most important keywords and don't want to lose that ranking. I've recently redesigned our site, currently in testing, to use the same standard desktop pages but to also have responsive, mobile friendly, pages for different view ports. My question is if anyone knows an estimated time frame that search engines (mainly Google) takes to re-crawl the site and restore SERP rankings to their previous levels? The reason is because we are HIGHLY seasonal and if we are not back at our top rankings by early December, at latest (November would be better), then we stand the chance to lose a considerable amount of traffic/revenue. -The Unenlightened One
Web Design | | Stew2220 -
Is it against google guidelines to use third party review sites as well as have reviews on my site marked up with schema?
So, i look after a site for my family business. We have teamed up with the third party site TrustPilot because we like the way it enables us to send out reviews to our customers directly from our system. It's been going great and some of the reviews have been brilliant. I have used a couple of these reviews on our site and marked them up with: REVIEW CONTENT We work in the service industry and so one of the problems we have found is that getting our customers to actually go online and leave a review. They normally just leave their comments on a job sheet that the workers have signed when they leave. So I have created a page on our site where we post some of the reviews the guys receive too. I have used the following: REVIEW TITLE REVIEW Written by: CUSTOMER NAME Type of Service:House Removal Date published: DATE PUBLISHED 10 / 10 stars I was just wondering I was told that this could be against googles guidelines and as i've seen a bit of a drop in our rankings in the last week or so i'm a little concerned. Is this getting me penalised? Should I not use my reviews referencing the ones on trust pilot and should i not have my own reviews page with rich snippets?
Web Design | | BearPaw881 -
How do you influence the default site title?
Hi, We have noticed that on brand searches, a site's page title is replaced with the name of the site or the business, we can understand that this is due to the fact that a CTR enticing title is not as important when the customer is looking for a certain brand. What tells Google what company name to display in this instance? We're having trouble with our French site displaying the page title, we are moving the position of the title code earlier in the page, but can't see why a) Telefleurs is not displaying the title chosen and b) why it is displaying EuroFlorist when our French brand is Telefleurs. Any advice on this would be much appreciated! Thanks, Sam JgLwnGV.png
Web Design | | seoeuroflorist0 -
Does interlinking on mobile site helps in seo & improvement in rankings
Hi, Does interlinking on mobile site helps in seo & improvement in rankings. Our desktop site & mobile site has same urls. Regards
Web Design | | vivekrathore0 -
New site or fix the old one
I have a delima. Basically the main business product I used to offer is not going to be offered anymore. The types of sales events we conducted for auto dealerships are not able to be insured any longer forcing the change. So I am pivoting to just offering direct mail and I plan on going into digital probably social, landing pages, content marketing and not sure what else. I was able to register http:www.roiautos.com and www.roidirectmail.com both variations of www.roiautosolutions.com withc was the original site. Also that is the closest to the actual name of the business. My question is whether to build a site focusing on direct mail using the direct mail dot com, or just to redo the current site. The current site doesn't have much rank if any because the old product was not something that was searched for. As a mater of fact 99% of my business came from referrals and word or mouth so I just never really bothered. My thoughts are that ROI Direct Mail will work better for search and I am even going to use that as a DBA and TM. But I am unsure of what to do for search. One thing that has to happen is that all references to offering staffed sales events have to be removed from any site per my insurance company. Any advice?
Web Design | | roiautos0 -
How do I learn how to build custom wordpress websites?
Is wordpress a good platform to build websites with? If so, what are some good resources to learn how to build custom websites using wordpress?
Web Design | | Lael0 -
Footer backlinks for sites I've developed
I link back to my website via my company name on the footers of sites I develop. Lately I've been changing this to my keyword and mixing and matching. This has been done for new sites I create and old sites I've not seen any benefit so far after a couple of months. Most my clients are hosted on the same server as my main site that it links back to. 1. Is this a bad idea to link back on the same IP?
Web Design | | sanchez1960
2. Is footer backlinks to the main developer going to annoy Google?
3. Should I change my main site's server, will it help? All my competitors seem to do it and as far as I can tell they seem to get better results than I do. Because I'm now changing them the reason I see no benefit? Thanks0