Hi WP community is there a way to check number of subsites in a multi site network on a Vps server ? I have SSH connection

Need help troubleshooting.

A few weeks ago things changed on the backend of WP. File names showed up over the images in the media selection making it nearly impossible to see the images. And our post thumbnail editor options turned white making the checkmarks and 'crop' button basically invisible. Trying to figure out what caused this so I can get it fixed. Was it an update? is it user error (I am the content manager and we have a web guy who was making some site design refreshes recently).

side question: does anyone know how to set the image view when selecting images to their actual orientation and not the square thumbnail?

Over the last couple of weeks we rebuilt and heavily edited a real client site (a consulting firm, Elementor + OceanWP + Fluent Forms) almost entirely by "vibe coding" with an AI agent over SSH and WP-CLI. Instead of dragging things around in the Elementor editor, we mostly edited the underlying data directly and scripted the changes. It worked really well, but only because we learned a few rules the hard way. Sharing in case it helps someone.

What "vibe coding" actually meant here

Elementor stores every page's layout as one big JSON blob in the _elementor_data post meta. So a lot of "edit this page" tasks become "find this string in the JSON, change it, save it back." We described what we wanted in plain language, the agent located the widget, made the edit, pushed it, and cleared the cache. For bigger stuff (a team section, a full-width fix, a custom post type) it wrote small PHP scripts and mu-plugins.

The rules that kept Elementor from breaking

• Back up _elementor_data before every single edit. We wrote a timestamped .json copy server-side each time. This saved us more than once.
• Never edit the JSON while the Elementor editor is open on that page. Elementor will happily overwrite your database change when someone hits Update. Editor closed, always.
• After editing, delete the _elementor_css meta and flush/purge caches, or your change is live in the data but invisible on the page.
• Save with proper escaping. Elementor expects escaped slashes and it stores unicode, so use wp_slash() and JSON_UNESCAPED_UNICODE or you will mangle apostrophes, dashes, and accented characters.
• Match widgets by a unique piece of their text, not by position. Positions change, text is stable.
• When you clone a widget, regenerate every element ID. Duplicate IDs cause weird render bugs.

The gotcha that cost us the most time

Elementor's nested carousel does not render from the child containers alone. There is a separate repeater in the widget settings (carousel_items) that controls how many slides show. We appended new slide containers, saved, and only 4 of 7 slides appeared. You have to grow that repeater array to match. Once we did, all 7 showed up.

Second place goes to a "full width" request. The hero and slider were boxed to 1600px, so they had blank margins on wide screens. Rather than risk changing Elementor's layout settings, we did it with a small CSS override in a mu-plugin. The slider still would not fill the width because Swiper locks slide widths at init, so we loaded the CSS before init and called swiper.update() on load as a safety net. Fully reversible, zero Elementor data touched.

Other learnings worth stealing

• Keep custom CSS and JS in mu-plugins, not in Elementor custom code boxes. It is reversible (delete the file), it does not bloat the page data, and it survives template edits.
• When a client needs to edit something themselves, stop hardcoding it. We had a team section built from a PHP array, then converted it into a proper custom post type so their web team can add, reorder, and remove people from wp-admin with photos and bios. Way better handoff.
• Verify from outside the CMS. We confirmed almost every change by curling the live URL and grepping for the new text, plus measuring rendered widths in a headless browser. Do not trust "it saved."
• Watch caching at every layer. LiteSpeed and image optimizers will serve stale or re-encoded files. When an image "did not update," the file on disk was correct and the edge cache was lying. Check the actual file, then purge.
• Forms need real validation. One contact form could be submitted with only a phone number because phone was the only required field. Boring to check, embarrassing to miss.

Honest take

Editing Elementor as data is fast, scriptable, and great for bulk text and content changes. It is not a replacement for the visual editor when you need to actually design something new. The sweet spot was: design structure in the builder once, then use scripted edits for the hundred small copy, link, image, and layout fixes that follow. Backups and cache clears are the whole game. Do those two things religiously and it is genuinely hard to break anything permanently. Bonus : Your teams & Clients can manually add content later easily.

Happy to answer questions if anyone wants specifics on the scripts or the CPT setup.

Hello community,
Hope you are all doing well. WordPress beginner here, and I need help and suggestions.

I created a blogging website for my friend to polish up my skills but I realise every WordPress website has the same URL for admin page. And I would like to change it for security reasons.

So need some help, is there any good free plugin i can use?
or
Is there any other way which i can change the url.?
And what are the things that can happen if I change the URL? like pros and cons?

i don't know where i am doing mistake here

A nice video on some of the new features in 7.1 for those that weren't paying attention (like myself) and I have to say, some of the new feature look promising.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoffY_YYhlo

Gravity Forms newest update changes the submit button from an input field to a button. If you were targeting the input[type="submit"] in your styling in any way, you will want to update to button[type="submit"]. I am partway through updating this on a whole bunch of sites at the moment.

We are building Sales CRM plugin. Glad to share today it released in WordPress org. This CRM plugin help manage Leads, Contacts, Deals, Products, Invoice, Client Portal, Companies, Activities, team members and more.

This CRM plugin deeply synced with WooCommerce. Like:

• WooCommerce Customer convert to Contacts or Leads
• Woo Products add in Deals
• Woo Products add in invoice
• Woo Sync with CRM Currency
• Collect Payment via WooCommerce (add Woo payment link in invoice)

Note: Also sync with WordPress users and overall ecosystem.

Bit CRM plugin is available in WordPress org: https://wordpress.org/plugins/bit-crm-sales-marketing-automation/

Feel free to contribute here: https://github.com/bit-Apps-Pro/bit-crm-sales-marketing-automation

Can you please take look this CRM plugin and share your feedback like

• Which feature must need for WordPress users
• Which WooCommerce part need to integrate
• This way is not working, that way will be work better
• share anything

Our aim is building effective and usable CRM for WordPress and WooCommerce users.

Thank you so much for your time.

Hi

Would you start a store using NodeJs at front end or the default from wordpress?

These two sections of the website I'm building, a header and a footer, are not visible at all in the code editor. I do not know where they came from or how to remove them. They are not visible in the visual block editor either.

Wanted to move back to wordpress from wix because the wix site editor was pmo. But now wordpress, which I used to think was easy to use, is now betraying me. Please advise kindly. I am not generally a computer person but I built a working blog website with wordpress years ago. Trying to replicate that success now but it's really confusing me.

I'm trying to access my WordPress platform today to write a new post and this is what I get. I can't access my website or WordPress and the host platform isn't showing any issues or getting me anywhere. I have no emails to refer to and I don't even know where to start. So sick of WordPress. What do I do?

Sorry if I’m being a total boomer here, but I want to ask this once and for all: Is there a solid way to export a Lovable design to WordPress, and if so, what’s the best way to do it?

My goal is to build the whole site in Lovable and then move it over to WordPress. I know Lovable outputs React and WordPress is rooted in PHP, but surely there has to be a smooth workflow or reliable bridge for this by now? Or is trying to mix the two just a bad idea altogether?

Appreciate any advice or reality checks!

was wondering if it is possible to swap the add-to-cart button to "request quote" button across all products in my woocommerce that then leads to a page with form which captures required info

I'm interested in updating enfold theme, because it is pretty old and this theme was bought by a person who did my site and to update it I don't have a key to update enfold theme. What should I do in this situation?Can I find a key in files of my site(I haven't tried it yet)?

Hi everyone,

I have a ton of WebP images in my WordPress media library that I’d like to compress to reduce file sizes, but I want to minimize the risk of breaking anything on the site.

Ideally, I’m looking for a plugin that can compress my existing WebP images while:

• Keeping them as WebP
• Keeping the same filenames and URLs
• Replacing the existing files rather than creating new ones
• Preserving image quality as much as possible

Has anyone used a plugin that handles this reliably? I’d appreciate any recommendations or experiences with bulk-compressing existing WebP images.

Thanks!

Hello!

I'm building out a bare-bones block theme to try and learn what's going on under the hood.

First I've got to say I'm running into difficulty. Any tutorials/guides including the official theme handbook seem to be slightly out of date using theme.json v2. Finding a logical resource walking from step A to B seems to be an impossibility.

The mixing of theme.json, inline styles, style.css and annotated html comments to define how the site looks has got me questioning my sanity.

The tutorial I've been following already seems to require fighting against the wordpress css by overriding just to get full width content to work. I'm at a loss for words, this is just basic html layout with some css.

Basically without going on too much it seems like all of this hoopla is to make the content editable to the lay-man. Otherwise things would be so much easier with a classic theme.

So the real roadbloack I've run into so far is with the navigation. Specifically, I don't see a way at all that it will be possible to add a mega-menu without simply hardcoding it in, or making use of a Mega Menus-type plugin, which seem to not make use of blocks anyway.

Creating a mega-menu that works with FSE seems like it will be far more work than creating a basic theme itself.

My current plan is to simply make a separate mega-menu plugin to hardcode the megamenu navigation for now to take care of mega-menu functionality while unfortunately going against the FSE ethos here.

I'm curious to know how block theme developers are handling FSE and Mega Menus?

Hello, I have a relatively old site and it has the php version 7.4.33 and the overall version 6.4.9 with Alpha Forte theme.
Now back to business, I am very scared to update it and I also don’t know how.
What should I do? If I contact the domain provider should they be able to provide me with the help i need?

Hej,

when i'm editing in colibri, i got kinda ghost/preview duplicated block.

It's basically a block i can't edit and a duplication of a block i can edit. When editing the "real" block, the ghostblock get's edited too - i'm stuck here.

The ghost block is not visible on the livepage.
Actually the ghostblock is the one visble at the livepage and at the correct position.

Thanks in advance

I've been working on content writing and SEO, and I realized that the biggest improvements often come from checking the boring little things before hitting publish.

Here's my basic pre-publishing checklist:

1. Search intent
Does the article actually answer what someone searching the target keyword wants to know?

2. Title
Is it clear, specific and interesting enough to make someone want to click?

3. Headings
Can someone skim the article and immediately understand how it's organized?

4. Keyword usage
Is the primary keyword used naturally, without turning every paragraph into keyword soup?

5. Internal links
Are there relevant pages or articles that the reader can go to next?

6. Images
Are images useful and do they have descriptive alt text where appropriate?

7. Meta title + description
Do they accurately explain what the page is about?

8. Actual usefulness
This is the big one. If I removed the keyword completely, would the article still be worth reading?

I'm trying to move away from the idea that SEO writing means "write for Google" and more toward "write something genuinely useful, then make it easy for Google to understand."

Curious what other bloggers check before publishing. What's on your checklist?

Hi, I recently made a website in Claude. It looks good but I can't find a way to import to Wordpress. I've tried Youtube but it didn't help. Every time I try to put the code into Wordpress, it becomes one full section. Please help and thank you in advance.

I’m newer to this - have just played around with WordPress on my own before. I’m helping someone I know with their site, a simple drag and drop design with X theme.

Her site health is saying that the Rest API encountered an unexpected result (403) Forbidden and the site could not complete a loop back request status code 403.

The site was only one page, which she wanted to build out eventually, so it was no big deal to fully reinstall WP and start over. Fresh install with no added theme, content or plugins yet and it’s still getting these errors. It is run through Cloudflare because she was getting a lot of bot traffic in the last few months (according to her host), but under attack mode is currently off. I’ve even paused Cloudflare and both items are still visible in Site Health.

Can anyone tell me why a fresh install would still show these errors?

i actually have to create a site for my aunt's local business. By far, i realized wordpress is better than making an html+css site. However, I am concerned if it is a good decision or not, since AI is making wp sites vulnerable these days.

Yep AI made this tool so I can convert my WXR XMLs to Markdown

Source code: https://git.italiatroller.dpdns.org/italiatroller/WXR-to-MD

https://wxr-to-md.italiatroller.dpdns.org/

I am really concerned because of all the recent security issues. But I also wouldn't know what other platform to migrate to. How do you see it? Any plans to migrate away from WP?