Did PHP 8 break your website?

PHP 8 broke my site

Xneelo Best Hosting

and is current with software upgrades

Our approach at The First Step when dealing with a PHP update on your server, is to put your site into maintenance mode. Head over to your Xneelo Konsoleh control panel and login to your account. Take a moment with the following steps to see if PHP version 8 breaks your site…read on…

Do it yourself for free, here’s how

A few easy steps

 

Want to troubleshoot this yourself? For Free? Here’s how….

Ready? You can do it!

Login to Konsoleh here > Manage Services > PHP Config and review your php settings.

On a shared hosting server max out your settings

Upgrade to PHP 8.0

Set ‘Display Errors’ to on

Dispay PHP errors

Save your settings. Visit your website. What do you see?

Your website is broken

All you see is lines of code at the top of your screen.

Don’t panic! Read between the lines. You will see pointers to plugins or theme that will give you an idea of what is causing the conflict with the new php update.

OR

There is an error message and you are locked out of your site!

Don’t panic! You got this. Here is what you do. You log onto your ftp server. This article does not cover ftp servers, but we will explain how to find your ftp server settings in your Xneelo Konsoleh dashboard:

To find your ftp server settings Login to Konsoleh here > Manage Services > FTP Users. You will see your FTP username but no visible password.

Resetting ftp password xneelo

Simply click ‘Reset Password’, copy the autogenerated password, and save

options. You will then open your ftp client and connect to your website using your domain name, ftp user and ftp password. Nothing will break if you reset the password. If you are using your ftp password to log into Konsoleh then you will need to use the newly generate one for the next login.

Whew! that was a lot of info… What now? I’m on my FTP server.

 

On your FTP server, navigate to public_html > wp-content > plugins. Rename the plugins folder to plugins1.

Clear your browser cache , visit your site, reload the page, and voila! 9 times out of 10 your site will be back online. Now you know for sure it is a plugin conflict. But which plugin. Well…you can use the same method for the plugins folder on the individual plugins. Rename the plugins1 folder to plugins again. Then one by one rename each plugin, check if the site goes back online. If not, revert to the plugin name, try the next plugin, adding a 1 at the end of the plugin folder name. This is an arduos method but if you have not managed to figure out the errors or you are completely locked out of the site, this should regain you access.

 

I can do this I’ll carry on reading…

Inbetween the lines of code that the errors display you will see file directories. You are looking at plugins, themes or WordPress errors.

Step 1. Ensure all your plugins, themes and WordPress versions are up to date.

Step 2. Disable the offending plugin / Switch to a default WordPress theme  and reload your website page. If the error goes away you know that the culprit is either the plugin or the theme. If it is a plugin you rely heavily on for your site, you will need to start searching for a new one that has kept up to date with the PHP updates and set this up to replace the offending plugin.

If your theme has broken your site, you will need to contact the theme developers and take things from there.

If you are not using the plugin that broke your site, delete it and have a nice day!

My site is fixed

I did it all by myself

Remember, once you have resolved the issues you need to return to the xneelo dashboard and switch off ‘Display Errors’ under your php settings and save.

Set PHP display errors to off

Well done you did it…

All by yourself!

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Link to the official Covid-19 Government Portal from your .za domain

Covid-19 website banner south africa

South African websites require Covid-19 Website Banner

For all .co.za domains

The South African government has asked all website owners to please link to the official Covid-19 resource portal somewhere clearly visible on your home page.

COVID-19 Corona Virus South African Resource Portal
Download the Covid-19 Gazette

Pay

Do it yourself for free, here’s how

3 Free Plugins

 

Easy Steps to install

 

Want to install this yourself? For Free? Here’s how….

Ready? You can do it!

Open your WordPress dashboard, navigate to > Plugins > Add New > and enter the search term:

south african covid-19 banner

into the search field to the right of the plugins install page. You will be provided with a few plugins to choose from. Here’s what I found:

Free Plugin Option 1:

South African COVID19 Banner

By Bridgement

Click ‘Install’ and then ‘Activate’ the plugin. Reload your page and you will see the ‘Covid Banner’ option now in the WordPress dashboard menu below > Settings.
Use the settings to configure the background color and font color. The plugin shows a neat popup at the bottom right of your screen which you can click to close which works well on mobile as it gives you more screen space once closed. It also has a link the the government portal.

Free Plugin Option 2:

South African Covid-19 Banner

Click ‘Install’ and then ‘Activate’ the plugin. Reload your page and you will see the ‘SA Covid-19’ option now in the WordPress dashboard menu below > Dashboard menu link.
Use the settings here to configure where you want the banner to show on your page and whether it should stay fixed to the top or bottom of the screen or scroll away with the content. I would select one of the options with scroll so this doesn’t interfere with your mobile view. The plugin shows a banner across your screen in the style you selected under settings. It also has a little more info including the Covid-19 hotline and whatsapp emergency contact details. It also has a link the the government portal. 

Free Plugin Option 3:

SA Coronavirus Banner

Click ‘Install’ and then ‘Activate’ the plugin. Reload your page and you will see the ‘SA Covid-19’ option now in the WordPress dashboard menu below > Dashboard menu link.
Use the settings here to configure where you want the banner to show on your page and whether it should stay fixed to the top or bottom of the screen or scroll away with the content. I would select one of the options with scroll so this doesn’t interfere with your mobile view. The plugin shows a banner across your screen in the style you selected under settings. You can also select/deselect the banner elements such as

You are also able to style the font colors. Definitely choose one of the scroll options. It is quite a wide banner so you don’t want it fixed over your mobile or desktop content.

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Thanks to Robin Devit, Seagyn Davis and Bridgement Devs for these free resources!

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Multi Language WordPress Website

Multi Language

Recommended Plugin

Multi Language Plugin that works with Divi

This plugin has a free version

Polylang-Multi-Language-WordPress-Plugin

Polylang Multi Language Plugin Configurations

What this article is really about is to help you get through that glitch that I have seen mentioned in several support forums. I was nearly ready to give up on the Polylang free plugin and just buy something because I couldn’t work out why my home page had disappeared and returned instead a 404 not found error.

There is already a very good article written by Divitheme with all the steps to getting the plugin working but I just wanted to add the step that wasn’t apparent to me. First off take a look at their tutorial. I would like to reiterate their steps are so nicely out-lined in the article by Divitheme so I am in no way trying duplicate their content, just add a little bit extra which helped me along the way.

So here goes.

Install the Polylang WordPress Plugin from the WordPress repository. Activate the plugin. Then go to the plugin settings via Dashboard > Languages > Languages and choose a language from the drop-down menu. Choosing a language will automatically populate the fields below this. Select the order of the languages setting your Default language to 0. Click ‘Add new  language’ . The language will appear on the right hand side in a list with all your languages. In the example below I chose English and German. Polylang-Language-Settings

You can also click the star icon on and off to set a language to the default language. In my case and the example above I only needed 2 languages. Install the Duplicate Post Plugin and activate it. When you head over to your posts or pages, hover over the list of posts or pages in your dashboard and you will see a new option next to ‘Edit | | Trash | View | Clone | New Draft’. Choose a page you want to translate. In my case it was the home page for my one page website. I clicked ‘clone’ and had an exact copy of my home page ready for translation. Here is the important step. Go into your primary language, in my case the English home page. On the right hand side you will see the language options. Under language I have selected English.

Link your default home page with your other language home pages

Now to link the 2 pages English and German I need to select the German page to link to from inside the Default home page language in my dashboard. So go to your default language home page dashboard. Once in put your cursor in the field below ‘Translations’. It will automatically show options of other pages on the site that are in another language. Select the desired page and language. Save your settings. You will see now that your page url has changed. For example the new url will be mydomain.com/en/home with the English translation code as part of the url. See screenshot below:

Polylang-Page-Settings

If you visit the page you just linked to you will see it is also linked and the url has incorporated the additional language code.

Hide the language code from your urls

If you do not want the url’s to show your language code you can hide this under the Settings > Languages > Settings > URL modifications. In the screenshot below I have configured the settings to show the language code in the url: Polylan-url-modifications

If you get the following Polyang Plugin Errors:

The chosen static front page must be translated in all languages

You will not be able to set the default home page until you have created at least 1 additional language for your home page and configured the settings above. Namely, go into your default language home page and choose the additional language to link it to. See explanation above.

Multi Language Menu

You will now navigate to Dashboard > Appearance > Menus and begin creating your multi language menu. First Create new menu, let’s say the English Menu. Add all the English language pages to it. Also add the new item created by the Polylang plugin called ‘Language switcher ‘.

 

Set the menu as your primary English Menu.

Create another additional language menu. Add the additional language pages to this menu. Set it as the default main menu for the additional language. Remember, you can only do this once you have created your additional language pages shown in the steps above.

Here is what the menu section would look like:

multi-language-menu

 

 

 

QUICK TIPS

Thanks to the Divitheme Article for getting me here.

Thanks to Gordon Johnson from Pixabay for the lovely image

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