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I came across an odd problem. Not sure how to proceed.
I have a Photos page managed entirely by Backlight. It contains 10 albums, and there's 10 menu items under the Pages menu. All of this is unknown to WordPress.
Next to that are my WordPress pages like Home, Bio, Contact, etc. All of that is managed by WordPress and unknown to Backlight. Still, the WordPress theme was generated by Backlight but that's as far as it goes.
All of this makes sense to me. Here's the problem I found.
I have a page About My Photography I created in WordPress. It's more than plain text. There's a Font Awesome icon, bullet lists of links, etc.
That page belongs under the Photos menu (which is managed by Backlight not WordPress).
The path <mydomain.net/photos/about-my-photography> creates a 404 error.
I have a dummy page in WordPress for Photos. As a child page I added the About My Photography. So if this were a purely WordPress environment, Photos and About My Photography would all work as expected. The About page is a sub-page and a sub-menu of Photos.
When I go to the Photos page, it's resolved by the Backlight code. But when I try going to the About sub-page, it's a 404 error.
The Photos menu (created by Backlight) does have the "right" URL mentioned above. It's just that that URL can't be found.
Is there a way to make this work?
Co I need to buy Pages just to get this one page?
Last edited by JimR (2017-10-18 11:38:22)
--Jim
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In creating the menu item, did you literally write "mydomain.net/photos/about-my-photography" for the URL? If so, then you'll want to prepend "http://" to the URL, and should work. Or "https://" if you're using it, or possibly just "//" to cover both cases.
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I've tried relative paths and the entire https:// path in the Menu Set URL.
Here's another clue. Even when I'm in WordPress and I've got the About page open in the editor. If I click on View Page (the page that's actually in WordPress) even the generates a 404.
Really strange.
If I click on view the "dummy" Photos page in WordPress, that goes to the /photos URL and the content from Backllight is shown. This is the URL defined in WordPress and the actual page is blank.
That happens to be the location for Backlight, so the Backlight contents from LightRoom and and the Backlight templates all do the right thing.
It's just the About page I created in WordPress as a child of Photos that isn't working. This URL generates a 404, even though that't exactly the URL WordPress reports at the permalink for the page.
https://mydomain.net/photos/about
Doesn't matter how I try to get to that URL (e.g. menu choice from Backlight, clicking view page in WordPress, or just entering it into the browser's address bar).
Something is strange. Backlight is causing that URL to generate a 404. I'm not sure how to temporarily disable Backlight just to confirm the URL actually is valid.
Something in the .htaccess file maybe? An interaction with my server? I'm at a loss. And I don't know how to re-create a simple page in Backlight without having Pages installed. Even then, I'm not sure that's going to work.
--Jim
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.htaccess would be my guess, but so long as we're discussing a hypothetical "mydomain.net", I can only guess.
You should ensure that you've put things together properly. You're not using our Pages Add-on, so your site should be structured thus:
.htaccess (from Wordpress)
backlight
galleries
index.php (from Wordpress)
wp-adminm
wp-content
etc.
In which case, Backlight is only doing URL things inside of the /galleries folder, while all else is managed by Wordpress, including the .htaccess file and its redirects.
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Without understanding it, I can verify that there is something in the .htaccess file that's causing the 404. I simply renamed it, and reloaded the page. Then the URL works. I should have thought to test that in the first place.
At least I know where to look next. I'll guess it's going to be some assumption by the hosting server "knowing" where WordPress files are, and preventing access to other areas.
Then again, on second thought, does Backlight install/modify the .htaccess file within the galleries directory?
BTW - Backlight is turning out to be awesome. I've been using TTG plugins since the very first release. I put off upgrading to Backlight until I moved my site to a new hosting service. I also added SSL and the new sever includes a more rigorous .htaccess.
Last edited by JimR (2017-10-18 15:09:12)
--Jim
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Thanks, Jim.
Backlight will manage the innards of the /galleries folder; you shouldn't need to get involved manually.
As for the .htaccess file at your root, I usually begin a Wordpress install with a newly created, empty .htaccess file. I then make it writeable, so that Wordpress can manipulate it. In Wordpress settings, under Permalinks, you can set your preference, save, and then Wordpress should populate the file as necessary.
If you're running any redirect plugins, error handlers, etc., I would disable them.
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