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Thanks. That's an interesting place for all of that stuff. I would never have thought to look there. Maybe Matt describes all of that in his documentation.
???
I have been to "Backlight Settings > Publisher" many times. I do not find "> Search" , only "Search Template", which I early on created and selected in this location.
Rod,
Again, thanks so much for your help.
The Search title is not appearing on my Search page. "search" does, of course, appear in the address field, i.e., https://collinsnet.us/backlight/search/ , when I go to my Search page. You can click on that link if you want to see for yourself what my Search page looks like.
One more question: Where is the "Search Entry field" to which you refer, or are you referring to the entry field on the Search page? That field is blank on my Search page (i.e., it does not have the instruction text that appears when I click on the Quick Search icon). When I type text into the entry field on my Search page (or the Search Field that shows up on the simple Search page that appears when I click on the Quick Search icon), the text I type does appear immediately.
Doug
Rod,
Thanks so much for your prompt reply. Between your suggestions and Matt's blog, most of my questions have been answered.
Unfortunately, I still can't get my custom text to appear on my Search page. It seems like my template should make that happen, but no luck.
Also, it seems that there is no way to have the search limited to photo captions. That would be my first choice. With the current "catch all" search criteria, I get too many irrelevant hits that mask what is useful to me.
Thanks again for your help.
Doug
Ben and Rod,
I have been playing around with Search in Backlight 2. If I add the Search function to my Main page template so the search icon appears in the top right of all but my Home page, the search function sort of works as I desire, but does not pick up the formatting of my site.
In addition, I changed the Default Menu for the Search Page (Designer-Menu Sets-Default-Design-Search) to "URL backlight/search/". I had not made any changes to this previously, it was just "as delivered" with Backlight 2. You can try this on my site ( https://www.collinsnet.us )and see what you get with that. The search field does appear and works (not quite how I would like), but I can't seem to include any text on that page (for search instructions), although I have put Search template information in the Backlight 2 Main Settings.
When I say the search "sort of works", I mean that it returns some correct results, but it also returns many results that do not match my search criteria. For example, if I search van Gogh with the intent of finding photos of van Gogh paintings, I get results that include van Gogh paintings, but I get many other results as well. Can the search function be modified so it only returns results for photos that have the search criteria (in this case van Gogh) in the photo Caption?
Thanks for your help.
Doug
Rod,
Thanks for your ideas. I am sure I put all of the files in the correct locations, and other than this problem, my site seems to be working fine. For example, the Contact form works. I don't know what might be different about the Search page.
I will keep "searching" for an answer. :-)
Doug
Rod,
Thanks so much. Knowing specifically which "Background Color" to change made it easy to change my Masthead in the way I wanted. I haven't had a chance to view Matt's video yet, but I will review it and I hope that will facilitate me making other color changes.
Doug
When I try to do a search from the Search Page on my site (www.collinsnet.us ), I am bounced to my Backlight login screen. I did not have this problem with Backlight 1.
Any ideas as to what I am doing wrong?
Thanks,
Doug
I have upgraded to Backlight 2, and I am trying to update my web site using the latest templates (Pangolin). Previously I was using Backlight 1 (and before that CE4, etc.) but had not updated all of my templates from Okapi to Pangolin. I am rectifying that now. In the process I am trying to clean up many things that have nagged me for a while.
My difficulty is that I am spending an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out which template settings do what. For example, there are many “Background Colors” (Color: Base - Backgrounds, Background: Page Background, Top Pallet: Background-color, Masthead: Primary Masthead: Background-color, etc.), and I cannot seem to figure out which ones to change to affect the background color I want to change.
For example, in the Masthead of my web site ( www.collinsnet.us ), I want the background color to match the almost black color behind the title words of my identity plate so the identity plate blends seamlessly into the Masthead. None of the settings I have tried change that background color. I have saved the change to the template, cleared the cache, and reloaded my web site after each time I have made a change.
Another question: The online documentation describes a way to monitor changes instantly by adding “?autoRefresh” to the url of the page whose template is being changed. This does not seem to work for me. Am I doing something wrong here or does this feature no longer exist? Is there a specific browser I need to use for this feature?
Thanks for any help you can give me.
Doug
Ben,
Thank you so much! With the info you provided I am now confident the transition will go smoothly.
Doug
I have been using Backlight since it was released (switched from CE4). I am now ready (I think!) to switch to Pangolin. I have one question before I commit:
What must I do during the transition to make sure that the order of the photos in my published albums does not change during the change to Pangolin?
I have more than 200 albums on my family web site. Some albums have just a few photos, most have ~50-200 photos, and some have more than 300 photos. Almost all of them have custom photo ordering which (please forgive the shouting) I MUST NOT LOSE.
Recreating the order after the transition to Pangolin would be extraordinarily difficult and time-consuming, if not impossible. The order helps to preserve the memories I am trying to capture in each album.
Thanks for the help! I know once I have transitioned to Pangolin, I will be glad I did.
Doug
Ben,
Thank you so much for figuring this out and solving this problem. For others following this thread in hopes of a solution, I think the link Jim provides above (also in Matt's latest newsletter) provides most if not all of what you need to solve your Contact email problem.
However, Ben also had me do this (it was necessary for me to also do this to ultimately solve the problem):
I will quote what Ben suggested I do:
"It may be worth removing the IP Address from the contents of the contact email to see whether that makes a difference. To do this, edit backlight/admin/application/delegates/ContactDelegate.php and comment out lines 82 and 83 so that they look like:
//$htmlMessage .= '<br/><p><strong>Sender IP Address:</strong> '.$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'].'</p>';
//$plainMessage .= 'Sender IP Address: '.$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']."\n";
This change may have been silently applied to the Backlight 1.1 download. If so, you can re-download Backlight 1.1 and just replace this one file. Any comment on that, Ben?
Special thanks to Ben for once again demonstrating that The Turning Gate and this Forum provide the best support on the web!
Doug
Ben,
Its in your email.
Thanks,
Doug
Ben,
I repeated my experiment with all five browsers. Chrome, Firefox, and IE all worked for both of my web sites. Opera and Edge did not, again, work with either web site. I have Opera configured with the VPN option. It may be that the problem is with Edge and Opera with VPN.
So, it may be that the problem is solved for the most commonly used browsers.
Doug
Ben,
Thanks for the info on php.ini changes, etc. That puts my mind at ease!
In addition to the php.ini changes, I downloaded the Backlight file you updated and put the new ContactDelegate.php file on my collinsnet.us site but not on my thewilderness.us site (a subdomain in my collinsnet.us site).
Next I performed an experiment. I sent emails from the Contact page on both of my sites (collinsnet.us and thewilderness.us (the subdomain site)). I sent these emails from five different browsers (Edge, Opera, Firefox, Chrome, and IE). I did this about 90 minutes ago and only 4 of the 10 emails have come through (one from collinsnet/Firefox, one from thewilderness/IE, and both from Chrome). So there still seems to be a problem.
Here's what I found on the Backlight PHP Info pages (it is the same for both collinsnet.us and thewilderness.us):
sendmail_from no value no value
sendmail_path /usr/sbin/sendmail -t -i -fdoug@collinsnet.us /usr/sbin/sendmail -t -i -fdoug@collinsnet.us
Does this look correct to you?
Any further ideas as to what is going wrong?
Doug
Rod and Ben,
I followed your suggestions for creating a php.ini file through the Bluehost cPanel. The file that was created was automatically placed in my public_html directory. I found the following section and added my email as indicated in the sendmail_path line:
Start of copied section:
[mail function]
; For Win32 only.
; http://php.net/smtp
SMTP = localhost
; http://php.net/smtp-port
smtp_port = 25
; For Win32 only.
; http://php.net/sendmail-from
;sendmail_from = me@example.com
; For Unix only. You may supply arguments as well (default: "sendmail -t -i").
; http://php.net/sendmail-path
sendmail_path = /usr/sbin/sendmail -t -i -f'doug@collinsnet.us'
; Force the addition of the specified parameters to be passed as extra parameters
; to the sendmail binary. These parameters will always replace the value of
; the 5th parameter to mail(), even in safe mode.
;mail.force_extra_parameters =
; Add X-PHP-Originating-Script: that will include uid of the script followed by the filename
mail.add_x_header = On
; The path to a log file that will log all mail() calls. Log entries include
; the full path of the script, line number, To address and headers.
;mail.log =
End of copied section
Following this change, I have successfully sent emails from the Contact page of my web site. Time, and further testing, will tell if this change has made the Contact email function robust.
There are a number of other functions called in the php.ini file as it was installed through the cPanel. I hope none conflict with my web site. As far I can tell so far (limited testing!) there are no conflicts and all is well.
I also made these two changes in the php.ini file:
max_file_uploads = 500 (from 20 - sometimes one of my albums contain several hundred photos)
date.timezone = "America/Seattle" (from "America/Denver", since I am in the US Pacific Time Zone)
I hope that I have correctly understood the purpose of these instructions and changed them correctly.
Thanks again to both of you for all of your help.
Doug
Ben,
Thanks so much for researching this problem.
I cannot find a php.ini file in my site. I did a search with FileZilla of the entire public_html directory on my site and nothing was found. Next I created a php.ini file with Notepad++ and placed it in my public_html directory. The 'Contact' email still does not work. Here are some specific questions:
Did I put the php.ini file in the correct place on my site?
My php.ini file is a simple text file (created with Notepad++) with just the code you specified and 'you@yourcompany.com' changed to 'doug@collinsnet.us'. Is it necessary to enclose this code in some "hooks" in order for it to be activated?
I am not using PHPlugins in my site. Do I need to activate PHPlugins in my template(s) in order for php.ini to work?
I apologize for these novice questions, but I am a novice at this!
Of course, this is only half of the solution you described. Will it take the next update of Backlight to obtain the other part of the fix?
Once again, thanks for your work on this.
Doug
Thank you!
Ben,
Thanks for the quick response. I did already have my email in the 'Current Email Accounts', although not actively hosted on Bluehost. After reading your suggestions, I went back in and the only thing I can change in the setup is the password. So, I "changed" the password (I actually just re-entered my current password in each of the two fields and clicked 'change password'). Still no emails coming through. :-(
Doug
I am having problems with email sent from my web sites 'Contact' page. Sometimes (about 10-20% of the time) the email goes through, but most of the time it does not. When the form is correctly filled out and the "Send' button is clicked, there is always a message saying the email was successfully sent.
Here's the setup:
Web site: www.collinsnet.us hosted by BlueHost
Site and Vendor emails: doug@collinsnet.us
Mail setup type: Mail
My email (doug@collinsnet.us) is hosted by Rackspace. It is a Microsoft Exchange email account. I also have the same email setup in the BlueHost cPanel, but it is not my active email.
I have spoken with both Rackspace and BlueHost tech support. Rackspace support said that when an email shows up in their log for my account from username@box####.BlueHost.com, that it is always successfully sent through to me. Apparently only 10-20% of the sent emails make it to the Rackspace server.
The response I received from BlueHost tech support is this:
'The issue you see is because our servers require you (or your script) to use a properly formatted, valid From: field in the email's header. If the From: field is not formatted correctly, empty or the email address does not exist in the cPanel, the From: address will be changed to username@box###.BlueHost.com.
You may refer following link for more information: https://my.bluehost.com/hosting/help/206 '
I have gone to the .../help/206 link, but I have no idea how to check and/or do what they suggest.
Any ideas on how I can resolve this problem?
Thank you,
Doug
Rod,
Thank you! I now have it inserted, but only on my Photo Album pages since that's where it is most useful.
Doug
Is it possible to add a "Go to Top" of page in the Footer? If in css, what would the code be?
Ben,
Thanks for taking the time to explain what went "wrong" with my migration from CE4 to Backlight, requiring me to spend a bit more time to get my site the way I wanted it. Yes, my CE4 (and my Backlight) templates contain numbers. I am in the habit of preceding names (names of templates, albums, etc.) with numbers, typically 00-..., 01-..., etc. I find this particularly helpful in Lightroom with Album names because I can force the Albums to appear in my desired order online by naming them sequentially 01-..., 02-... , etc., then sorting by the slug in Lightroom.
For example, if you look at my Album Set for our trip to Australia in 2008 ( http://collinsnet.us/galleries/travel/2 … australia/ ), the albums are in the order in which we visited the various cities or regions of your country. Maybe that is not the best way to do it, but it works for me. By the way, we had a wonderful trip. My wife and I loved Australia and the Australians we met were wonderful and welcoming!
In any case, I hope my and Daniel's experiences were helpful in your troubleshooting of the problem, and I want you to know that I very much appreciate the help you have given me over the years for all of the TTG Publisher versions I have used. I think I started with the very first TTG software for Lightroom and have used every version since then. In spite of this particular glitch, this has been the easiest transition yet. I think what Matt and you do is amazing, especially considering you must work within the constraints of Lightroom. I am also very grateful for all of the help Rod has given me over the years. It seems to me that at least one of you is awake and monitoring the forum 24 hours a day!
Thank you!
Doug
Hi Ben, et al,
I did follow Matt's suggestion (clone, rename, delete, reassign...). The template to which I reassigned did propagate through in LR to all of my albums. However, when I tried to republish the photos (with the upload metadata only switch set in Publisher) in order to get my photo captions to show, I received an error message about not finding the template. Sorry, I did not take note of the specific wording of this error message. I think this is probably the same error message than Daniel mentions above.
To resolve this error, I found I needed to right click every album, select Edit Album... (my new, correct, template did already show), then just click Edit to close the dialogue box. My process was to do this for every album in an Album Set, select the Album Set, then choose select all for the photos in the Album Set, then select Mark to Publish, then click Publish. The republishing then proceeded without error and my metadata seemed to propagate successfully.
Even though my site has 35 Album Sets, 289 Albums, and more than 15,000 photos, this entire process only took a couple of hours.
Overall, from when I purchased and downloaded Backlight, Pages, and Theatre, it took me about two weeks to completely roll my site from CE4 to Backlight, probably spending no more than a couple of hours a day. This was, in my opinion, a very easy transition, especially compared to going from CE3 to CE4, for example. So far I am delighted with the power and ease of using Backlight, Pages, and Theatre. When I've made a few more tweaks, I may post a link to my site on the Backlight Showroom forum. However, I feel like my site should not be viewed in the same context as the beautiful sites of Daniel Leu, Jon Evans, Tom Owens, and others, including, of course, Rod Barbee's.
Thanks for all the help I have received on this forum. It made this transition relatively easy and fun for me.
Doug
Thank you Matt! That significantly reduced my work load. I think the site is almost ready for prime time.