Ghosts in the Machine?

[ErgoArchitecture]

Hi again,

We have been duplicating pages as backups before major edits since we began our site months ago. All of a sudden, when we duplicate pages, the duplicate is much different than the original.

At first we suspected the page copier (php code in our child theme) but we replaced it with a different copying routine and had the same problem. We then replaced it again with a plugin, but the copied pages had the identical problems as before. I looked at the HTML of the original and duplicates and they appear to be identical as well. All I can think of is that the pages are being treated differently due to the time stamp somehow?

Some examples (Titles are links to the pages):

ORIGINAL

.

CLONE - Sections have padding and bottom margin

.

ORIGINAL

.

CLONE - Huge logo, no background images below masthead, caption left justified

There are other random problems with with the cloned pages too.

On the quotations page (first example) the gaps are created by padding and a bottom margin in .x-section which I solved by removing them with CSS, but all our pages are blowing up this way and I’m not sure how we are going to be able to proceed with site development without making backups.

Any idea what might be causing this, or how we can troubleshoot it?

Thanks!

[ruenel]

Hello @ErgoArchitecture,

Thanks for writing in!

By default, the section has a default padding of 45 pixels and have a default margin too. You will need to edit the page and make sure that each of your section has a 0 padding and a 0 margins.

Or you just add this custom css:

.x-section.ergo-section-rfp-top {
    padding: 0;
    margin: 0 auto;
}

Hope this helps.

[ErgoArchitecture]

Hi RueNel,

Thanks for your comments above.

Yes, we can fix the padding and margin in the first example, in fact I already wrote the CSS to do that as I mentioned in text above. But what about all the other problems that the duplication creates on all the other pages?

I was hoping to figure out why two pages that seem identical render differently? Three different programs produce the same seemingly identical file, which looks perfect in the Cornerstone Editor, but suddenly doesn’t render properly. It is very hard to deal with because as I say, everything is PERFECT in the editor. There is nothing to fix. But when I preview it all kinds of things fail.

Very often it is things that we are managing with classes, like the first example when our classes overriding the X-theme default padding and margins are suddenly ignored. But the problems are not always CSS related. For example, all the background images are missing. We are sizing them with CSS, but they should at least be there! I can see them fine in the editor. And why is all of our CSS suddenly failing anyhow, when the same CSS works perfectly on the identical page it was duplicated from? This doesn’t make any sense…

Our web host is still using PHP v5.7, and we just got a warning from WordPress about this. They also seem to be using old MYSQL too. Could that have anything to do with it? Also, all this trouble started right about the time we created a child theme. Could we have broken something when we did that?

I am having a very hard time troubleshooting because I can’t see anything wrong in the editor; but then when the page renders in the preview or live everything goes bad (and I have confirmed this on several different OSs and browsers.) The errors are perfectly consistent. Each bad page renders identically everywhere.

Any thoughts you have on how I could try to troubleshoot would be greatly appreciated!

Steve

[rad]

Hi Steve,

May I know the process of cloning or duplication that you did? I tried on my installation and cloned sections has the same padding and margin.

It seems the options are being removed when rendered on live page, hence, it uses the default CSS came from stack stylesheet.

But I’m not sure which part of it is removing them, it’s not cornerstone issue since it’s not happening within the builder. Have you tried clearing the style cache in Admin > X > Settings > System?

The theme only runs on top of Wordpress so the version should have no problem, unless there is an issue between Wordpress and your hosting environment and affect the entire process. I haven’t seen similar issue like this, have you tried it on different host just for testing?

Thanks!

[ErgoArchitecture]

Hi Rad,

I didn’t even know that Admin > X > Settings > System existed LOL. I did see that Administrator>Macros was set to text only so I returned that to Reset to Defaults. However, the default seemed to be text only anyhow.

But when I cleared the style cache as you suggested everything went back to normal!

Thank you Soooooo much!

Steve

[christopher]

Glad that you managed to fix the issue .