Empty paragraphs inserted before and after button

[sarammog]

Hi. This is a weird one. I’ve set up a section on a home page to show the latest blog post in. Set up like I usually do on other websites, but never had an issue with. A post set to show recent posts with a count of 1.

The article displays fine in cornerstone but on the front end it is inserting a blank paragraph above and below the button. It seems to be happening as soon as I add a link to the button.

Strangely, the buttons below it on the page are being affected the same way. As soon as anything is added to the link field, it creates the paragraphs.

On the off chance it was some random error, I’ve deleted the section and recreated it a couple of times but without any change.

Any ideas?

[prakash_s]

Hello @sarammog,

Thanks for writing to us.

It seems that there is an issue with broken HTML. I would suggest you please go to the Header Bar->remove this Text element and recheck it again. Please have a look at the given screenshot below.

Please clear your browser cache and recheck it, or check it in the private mode of the browser.

Thanks

[sarammog]

Yeah, that’s the shortcode for a modern events calendar list in the menu. Removing the shortcode from the text element fixes the issue but the list really needs to be in the header.

Any idea what the conflict is? I don’t seem to be seeing what you saw in the html.

[ruenel]

Hello @sarammog,

The Text element is only good for text content with paragraphs and inline shortcodes. MEC shortcodes and any other shortcodes that return DIV elements may not be advisable inside the Text elements. We highly recommend adding them to a Raw Content element instead. If you need to format the returned output of the shortcodes, you may use custom CSS instead.

Best Regards.

[sarammog]

I changed it to a Raw Content element but it now seems to have affected more buttons and post elements on all pages.

[ruenel]

Hey @sarammog,

The issue seems to only happen in your site. When I imported the page into my test site, I cannot replicate the issue.

• See the link in the secure note below.

Could we possible temporarily deactivate the plugins or check for any custom JS coding added into the page?

Thanks.

[sarammog]

I’ve disabled all the plugins and the only plugin that causes the issue is Modern Events Calendar. I looked at the test site and it doesn’t seem to be running that plugin which may explain why it the buttons are displaying correctly. I don’t have any other custom JS code on the site but feel free to have a play around.

Everything is up to date but there’s a couple of updates to plugins for MEC and Envira which both fail to install. Envira says it’s updated to 1.13.1 but then afterwards says it’s still on 1.13.0 and the update is still available. MEC says 7.29.0 is available but when I try to update it says ‘update package not available’.

[ruenel]

Hey @sarammog,

The latest and stable versions in our Themeco repository are the following:
Envira Gallery: 1.13.0
Modern Events Calendar: 7.28.0

The latest versions were released:
Envira Gallery - Dec. 18, 2025 -> https://enviragallery.com/changelog/
Modern Events Calendar - Dec. 25, 2025 -> https://mec.webnus.net/change-log/

Our dev team is still testing for conflict and compatibility issues. Once they are done, these latest versions will be available in our Theme repository.

Meanwhile, I have tested your Homepage layout on my local testing server with both the MEC and Envira Gallery active. I could not replicate the issue:

Is this a staging site? Do we have permission to test for a plugin conflict and determine what has caused the issue on your site?

Cheers.

[sarammog]

Sure. Have a look, none of it is live. The sign in details I sent are admin level.

[ruenel]

Hey @sarammog,

After a thorough investigation, I found out that the MEC shortcode you have added in the custom header is the one causing the Button issue.

I would recommend using the Loopers to display the latest Events instead. Check out the demo I created and see how the buttons below are displayed.

Cheers.

[sarammog]

Thanks. I’d originally set it up like this but was having problems changing the formatting for the date. I need it to be like:

{{dc:post:meta key=“mec_start_date” format=“j F Y”}}

But I don’t know if the field is just saved as text rather than in date format, but it just doesn’t change.

[tristup]

Hi @sarammog,

The mec_start_date is stored as date. If that is not changing, you can add type=“date” inside the Dynamic Content tag like the following.

    {{dc:post:meta key="mec_start_date" type="date" format="j F Y"}}

If it does not work for you, we need to investigate it further through the WordPress admin dashboard.

Thanks

[sarammog]

That worked perfectly. Thanks for all your assistance.

[tristup]

Hi @sarammog,

Glad that we are able to help you.

Thanks