[Resolved] Please make a blog that works.

[Stewart]

I have the world’s ugliest blog and its made with your theme. Originally I asked why I couldn’t make the blog look like this front page here: http://www.wordpix.ca/stories, also made with your theme. Your reply was unhelpful and your suggestions didn’t work. Now the blogger has added a second entry and it doesn’t post like it should either. I’ve looked at what you call documentation and it is useless. It consists of a video with no sound that hurries through the obvious funcitons with no explanation at all.

I don’t have time for this and I don’t appreciate being embarrassed by this theme. I’ll put something together manually that works and maybe find a plugin that will do the job as yours is supposed to. Your theme is generally useful because it’s not full of glitz but I won’t likely renew it.

I could be more specific about this complaint but I can’t even find the original post I made here on this forum. That in itself is not professional. I want a theme that does the job and if I need help I want documentation that works. If I want to follow up on something I don’t want to spend half an hour trying to remember what words I used so I can come up with a search term.

[Tom]

Hi there,

To find your old topics, click the “Forum Profile” button at the top of the page next to the search bar.

This was your last post: https://generatepress.com/forums/topic/blog-improvement/

I just read through it and this post, but I’m not entirely clear what you’re trying to do.

The site you like is using a pretty simple GeneratePress setup. I’ll try to list out the different aspects of it here:

1. Left sidebar set in Customize > Layout > Sidebars.
2. A menu created in “Appearance > Menus”, and added to the Left Sidebar widget area with a Navigation widget. You can also use the Recent Posts widget instead of creating a menu.
3. The blog is set to display 1 post per page in Settings > Reading (Blog pages show at most).

If you want your blog to be your homepage, you can set that in “Settings > Reading” as well, using the “Your homepage displays” option. If you set it to “Your latest posts”, the blog will display on the home page.

I’m sorry our documentation hasn’t been helpful. We’re always happy to help here in the forum if you’re not getting anywhere with the docs. Sometimes it takes some back and forth in the forum to reach a solution.

Let me know if the above steps are helpful at all.

Thanks!

[Stewart]

I want my ideas to work on the blog page, but the blog page will not accept sidebars.

The blog setup is supposed to allow only 55 words then put a “more” button after that. This is not happening.

I appreciate your very quick response and apologize for my cranky post but all I want is a theme/plugin that does what it’s supposed to do without a lot of wasted time. I’ve wasted more than an hour trying to make your product work and researching other plugins that don’t work any better. What I want is absurdly simple. I’ll have to work it out myself with PHP and that will take hours.

Your documentation is sadistic. I’m willing to bet you’re losing thousands of customers because they can’t figure out aspect of your plugin & theme. I’ve had this problem before.

[Tom]

Is this option set to “Excerpt” in Customize > Layout > Blog?: https://www.screencast.com/t/gLv2lRi32BE

When you say it doesn’t accept the left sidebar, what does that mean? Are you getting a specific error?: https://www.screencast.com/t/LwfOkX2DLsxG

[Michael]

Hey there.

I just want to defend the GP Theme. I had 5 minutes to redo the layout and functionality you want. So please don´t blame the GP Theme! https://geo.gwdev.ch/

If you are looking for a theme/plugin that is supposed to be able to do the individual jobs of 1´000´000 people then good luck in finding it.

I just thought your post isn´t fair since Tom explained all the steps you need to recreate what you want. I understand your frustration but please don´t blame the theme.

For the border-bottom of the posts in the sidebar navigation you can post this css code in the customizer:

.menu-sidebar-container ul li {
    border-bottom: 1px solid black;
    margin-bottom: 10px !important;
}

I wish you all the best.

[Stewart]

I think Generate-Press is a terrific theme and I’ve said so in the past. I use it because it’s simple and powerful. But this blog feature barely works and the documentation is poor. Just trying to find documentation is difficult as you have to search through posts. The video about the feature isn’t listed under documentation but under the hype about the product.

[Stewart]

No the blog page doesn’t accept sidebars and there’s no warning. Also, the 50-word limit doesn’t work in the second post. The whole post is displayed. The limit does work on the first post, however.

Yes the Excerpt option is checked.

I did deactivate all my plugins but no change.

[Tom]

I think I see the issue. You’ve used the “Video” post format, which will show the full content (so it actually shows the video).

If you change that to the “Standard” post format, it will show the excerpt.

As for the sidebar issue, can you send me temporary login details so I can see why it’s not working? If so, feel free to send them through our contact form: https://generatepress.com/contact

Thanks!

[Stewart]

Okay, the video post format was selected– I changed it to standard and that fixed that issue

As for the sidebar issue, I finally figured out that I have to select it in the Customize section, but not on the actual page. So that issue is fixed.

Now I’ve got a sidebar on the left with a menu but of course clicking the menu to display a full post also takes me away from the page.

Can you think of a way to keep me on the page but just display the post in full?

Thanks! I apologize for my cranky tone in earlier posts and I do appreciate your help.

[Tom]

Hi Stewart,

That would be quite complex to achieve, unfortunately. It would require custom javascript as well as changes to the template itself (to add a hidden div with the full post).

[Stewart]

Well I’ve figured out this simple workaround by adding a sidebar to every post and using a utility called Content Aware Sidebars. Works almost exactly like my first example except your travelling from one post to another, but you still see the blog menu.

[Tom]

Awesome! Glad you got a workaround working 🙂

[Author]

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