[Support request] Gaining access to Vacation site elements

[mediaropa]

I’ve adopted the Vacation site from the GP sites for a new author’s website. However, I need to adjust or change several aspects of more than one element, and I cannot gain access to the elements. For examples, 1) the Home page has a default background photograph I’d like to change. 2) The site logo does not show on the Home page. I cannot access either of these features to make a change (as I did easily in the basic GP Premium site). In addition, the Home page has four panels, in each of which I have a pic of a book, its title and sub-title. In one of the panels, however, the line-spacing and font sizes are different than the other three. I cannot access the panels to make them the same (can’t even see where the panels begin and end––must simply input in a blank block and hope for the best). Worse still, the site will not let me place ‘Home’ in a menu. I think all these issues are related to lack of access through the normal block editing process. I don’t intend to deal with code, so I need to know how to gain access to customize the ‘Vacation’ site Home page and get it on the menu and get issues fixed within the page.

[Ying]

I cannot gain access to the elements.

What does this mean? Do you mean you don’t know how to edit the elements or you know how but the system refused your access?

And please link us to your site and provide credentials (admin access), we can help take a look at the backend.

[Ying]

You can also try these first:

1) the Home page has a default background photograph

In the homepage editor, select the 1st container block, you will see the background option to switch background image:
https://www.screencast.com/t/rPVsSyvJV

2) The site logo does not show on the Home page

Go to appearance > elements > home merge, you can switch the homepage logo at the site logo section:
https://www.screencast.com/t/mFmCakZw

For other issues, let’s deal it when I have the access to your site 🙂

[mediaropa]

I know how to edit the elements, but ‘Home’ is only partially available in Customize theme. Nowhere does ‘background,’ appear, whether to give you a choice of illustration, photo, pattern, or color. In addition, nowhere are the four panels that appear in the Vacation ‘template’ or in my own developing site visible to edit. When I give you access to the site you’ll see that panels 1,3, and 4 have the same font size and line spacing, but panel 2 is different. Also, in Contact and About, text goes to the edge of the editing block. Padding seems to be set by default, but does not appear to be activated and no means of changing it can be found. ‘Home’ is also noted to be an ‘Invalid’ page on the Menu element menu and I can find no way to change that.

[Ying]

You are still using classic editor?

All the pages now in GP site library are built with blocks, so if you have classic editor activated, you might not be able to gain access to the Gutenberg (block based) page editor.

solution would be deactivate classic editor.

[mediaropa]

You should access my site now to see what it looks like now that I’ve deactivated the classic editor. Should I attempt the recovery of eash block as the page suggests?

[Ying]

You could, but I think the easier way would be remove this template, then try to import it again with classic editor deactivated.
https://www.screencast.com/t/KwMJ07vq

So all the blocks will stay as blocks.

[mediaropa]

It looks as though that would mean importing all of my content for the third time. I have all the media, of course, but the text is not saved in WordPress as far as I’ve found. Why do you think that would be easier? It seems as though it would take a long time.

[Elvin]

Hi there,

To add to the conversation:

The issue w/ having Gutenberg blocks converted to classic editor content and then back to Gutenberg blocks is that the previous state of being a Gutenberg block can’t be recovered easily once it’s a classic editor content.

If a classic editor content was originally a block from a plugin, when you try to convert it back to its original plugin block, the editor won’t know what plugin block it was originally so it tries to convert it into a Gutenberg default block instead.

This means, it is possible that the plugin specific stylings will not apply to the re-converted blocks as they will likely have changed HTML structure.

In your case specifically, I’d suggest:

Consider ditching the classic editor completely as this is obsolete. The support for this has officially ended December 2021.

If you must use classic editor on some parts of the page, Gutenberg editor has a Classic block.

I’d say you can salvage the pages without re-importing but you’ll have to weigh in on the amount of effort it takes to fix some parts that broke as it may actually be better to re-import Vacation if the effort to be exerted to fix the broken parts will be too much to handle.

[Fernando]

Hi there,

If that’s the case, this would be preferential. Usually, since some functionalities inherently don’t work on the Classic editor as expected, importing with the Gutenberg Editor active would be the one more preferable.

As an insight, we’ve had customers having issues when switching from Classic to Gutenberg editor. Missing Container IDs for instance.

I checked your website and there doesn’t seem the be such issues present.

With that said, you can try recovering each Block, and if there’s an issue, you can simply try to rebuild it manually if that would be quicker.

Hope this clarifies. 🙂

[mediaropa]

Thanks to all of you for the feedback. I’m going through each container to make changes, and so far it seems to be working. I’m not certain how to add a container for the universal Heading and especially for a heading that includes the Primary menu on the Home Page. If you have any insight to offer on that score, I’d appreciate it.

This seems to be a style issue like what you might have in InDesign if a previous worker on a project put everything in the wrong style or didn’t even know about styles. I’ve had that issue, and it’s a mess. So I’ve deactivated the classic editor, but I have three other websites that were made with it (though only one with GeneratePress). What do you see as the best approach to making the transition on those sites?

Thanks again for your help!

[Ying]

I’m not certain how to add a container for the universal Heading and especially for a heading that includes the Primary menu on the Home Page.

I’m not sure which part are you referring to.
Can you describe it more specifically?

Here’s the link to vacation site template: https://gpsites.co/vacation/
Let me know which text on which page you are talking about, thanks!

What do you see as the best approach to making the transition on those sites?

If you are NOT going to edit the posts/pages built with classic editor, even with classic editor plugin deactivated, they will likely stay the same on frontend.

If you want to convert them to blocks, this article should be helpful:
This article should be helpful: https://www.wpbeginner.com/plugins/how-to-bulk-convert-classic-blocks-to-gutenberg-in-wordpress/

[mediaropa]

Thanks for continuing to work with me. The container I’m missing is at the very top of the Vacation site – it has the site logo and name and two menu items. On the full Home Page (which doesn’t say ‘Home’ btw, which is what I’d prefer––while having it remain the Home page) the logo, name, and menu items are shown with a transparent background over the photo that covers the whole page. If you scroll down the page, logo, name, and menus retreat upward slightly onto a white background. When you click the ‘Accommodations’ menu item, the dropdown list includes semi-transparent background rectangles under each word. I would like all of that functionality. At the moment, I can’t get any menu to show anywhere.

So I’m guessing that those containers got lost in transition. I’m reluctant to import the site again for fear of losing, once more, what I’ve worked so hard to achieve. What do you suggest?

[Fernando]

Hi there,

Let’s try addressing the issues one by one.

With regards to the Menu items, it seems that there is no Menu set as the Primary Menu.

This can be seen in Appearance > Customize > Menus: https://share.getcloudapp.com/DOu4m7Rp

Or Appearance > Menus: https://share.getcloudapp.com/jkuvmNd0

With regards to the Logo, kindly go to Appearance > Elements > Home Merge: https://share.getcloudapp.com/xQuqz8dk

Then, add your Site Logo as such: https://share.getcloudapp.com/nOuR9yE0

Furthermore, if you want to make the Page Hero full width, edit your Front Page and set the Container Block’s Container to full width: https://share.getcloudapp.com/nOuR9yBY

With regards to the site title adding “Private:”, if your concerned about this, one approach to remove this is adding a PHP snippet as such: https://wp-mix.com/remove-private-post-titles/

Adding PHP: https://docs.generatepress.com/article/adding-php/#code-snippets

Adding it through Code Snippets should work.

Hope this helps! 🙂

[Author]

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