Essential Grid working fine on one site, not working on another

[umbertofederico]

Hey guys. I’m currently trying to transfer my test site’s content to the live site. Everything went smooth so far BUT now Essential Grid is giving me a massive headache.

On the test site everything is fine - I use Essential Grid to load products on the shop page and posts on the blog page. All shows up nicely and works smooth. However - after transferring all content to my live site and exporting/importing the grids, the blog page does not load. The shop grid works fine though.

I’ve tried everything: delete the grid and create it again manually, delete the posts and import them again, disable all plugins to see if that causes the grid not to work…nothing. It doesn’t work.

Here is the working site: http://playground.umbertofederico.de/blog/

And here is the live site (in maintenance mode): https://umbertofederico.de/blog/

[umbertofederico]

I think I kind of figured it out. One problem was, that the excerpt length of elements in the skin editor of Essential Grid must not be set to “characters”. Only “words” works. Another thing that made the grid not show up is the cornerstone site builder. It does show up in the editing window just fine, but when I save the page and try to preview it, nothing shows. Not even the header or footer of the page. If I don’t use cornerstone builder and just use the shortcode in the wordpress page editing screen, everything works fine.

It is kind of frustrating lately that the extensions you provide don’t work as they should. After all the recent updates, upgrades and changes that you made to X and X Pro, I feel that the whole system became significantly more unstable and unpredictable. I just spent two full days to figure out, why things don’t just work as they should.

Maybe you should’t focus too much on packing your theme with a ton of stuff and controls and instead make sure, that everything works fine. Customizer import and export or the under construction extension are just two examples. Yes I know - a lot of these are third party plugins and can’t be covered by your support team - which does a great job by the way. And I don’t say that everything is bad - you guys generally do a great job with your theme and extensions. But if you tested things before pushing out updates or warned people about possible compatibility issues (like Cornerstone and Polylang), these problems wouldn’t come up for your customers. It is kind of annoying since I have 10 sites running on your system and customers are getting mad at me.

[rad]

Hi there,

Thanks for posting in.

We don’t have direct control over bundled plugin’s development, and we could only forward the bugs we can find. I’m not sure what issue you’re having with Essential Grid, would you mind providing a video recording? I can add that to our issue tracker for further checking.

Or is it just related to skin layers (excerpt) as you said? Then it’s probably not a bug but configuration related. And how did you move your staging to live? That process could cause issues as well.

I checked the grid in the builder and I can confirm the issue, but it’s not because of the theme or updates. Plus, this works okay on my installations, so if it’s update related then I should get the same issue as well. In your case, it’s because of this error Uncaught ReferenceError: ajaxurl is not defined and it’s not theme related. And about the header and footer, make sure to use a template that has header and footer, your blog page template uses a No Footer template.

I also created a draft page here and added the shortcode https://umbertofederico.de/?page_id=16163 but it’s blank which means, it’s an internal server error.

Let’s do this,

1. Ensure everything is up to date according to our version compatibility list at https://theme.co/apex/forum/t/troubleshooting-version-compatibility/195. Please follow the best practices when updating your theme and plugins. See https://theme.co/apex/forum/t/setup-updating-your-themes-and-plugins/62 for more details.

2. Clear all caches including browser cache then deactivate your caching plugins and other optimization plugins.

3. If you’re using a CDN, please clear the CDN’s cache and disable optimization services.

4. Test for a plugin conflict. You can do this by deactivating all third party plugins, and seeing if the problem remains. If it’s fixed, you’ll know a plugin caused the problem, and you can narrow down which one by reactivating them one at a time.

5. Remove custom CSS, Javascript and templates.

6. Reset your htaccess file by renaming it to .htaccess-bak. Then in WP Admin Menu, go to Settings > Permalinks and just click the Save Changes button.

7. Contact your host to increase your allocated memory or do it yourself by adding this code to your wp-config.php

define( 'WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '256M' );
define( 'WP_MAX_MEMORY_LIMIT', '512M' );

If the issue persists, then what’s left to do is get the details of the error and before we move forward. Please edit your site’s wp-config.php and replace this line define('WP_DEBUG', false); with these new lines

define('WP_DEBUG', true);
define('WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY', false);
define('WP_DEBUG_LOG', true);

Then test your blog page in the builder and in the live, please test the draft page the same way too. Then provide the debug.log file’s content in your reply. You can find that file under /wp-content/ folder and you may use your hosting’s file manager or FTP to do that.

About the updates, we always recommend doing maintenance, major updates, and even redesign in a staging site(cloned from the stable site). It’s common practice in web development. Any major updates contain more features and maybe different structures than the previous versions. And it’s normal since it’s major update, a different one from a previous stable version. We have to release updates for users starting from scratch or for users who wish to test it first. For existing and stable site, it’s not recommended to jump right into the big changes without testing it.

And for unseen issues upon updates, we will try to find some workaround, or at least add them to our issue tracker to inform our developers. Pro has known issues with translations even from its first version, it’s known issues which a bit complex, and the updates only contains partial fixes especially for WPML, but yes, still buggy (given that there are many kinds of translation plugins) and our developer are still in the process of improving them

As for unchecked issues, the updates for cornerstone/X/Pro overlaps with the updates of the bundled plugin which breaks the integration between them, it’s when the plugin’s author decided to change the naming of their internal codes/classes. And its slipped since it passed our first set of tests, but I agree that we should strictly check it more often.

Thanks for understanding.

[umbertofederico]

@Rad - I know you got a lot on your table but while I was waiting for your reply, I went on working on my site, changing things around and getting things right. That’s why not everything is as it was when I posted my topic.

The blog page - and every other page on my site hasn’t got a footer now since I couldn’t get the original footer to stick to the bottom. So I used the header builder instead, to create a sticky footer. In order for the original footer area not to show, I had to change to templates without footer.

Regarding the problem with Essential Grid: moving the scripts to the footer (“JS To Footer:”) in global settings, made everything work smoothly. I had however exported the grid from the test site and imported it into the live site - as I did for all other grids. Interestingly, all other grids worked fine. Just the blog grid didn’t. I had also exported the blog page (cornerstone export) and created an identical one on the live site. Did’nt work. And I had tried all you mentioned above - without luck. I’m just glad it works now. But thanks for your extensive explanation.

I also know, that you guys have your schedules which might not always go along with the other developer schedules thus ending up in plugin incompatibility at times. I wonder if you and the third party developers could somehow find an agreement to this - they should keep you updated on what they’re chaning and when so you can adjust accordingly.

As I said - when you as a theme developing company provide extensions from WITHIN your theme, I expect them to work fine.

[christian]

Thanks for your feedback.