[Susan Braiden]

Hello there.  I’m looking for a little assistance with troubleshooting an issue that’s been driving me a bit mad.

I have been trying to change the background image displayed on my WordPress site.  I use CBOX 1.0.8 with the default Infinity Theme, and am finding a handful of options are simply unable to be changed in the onboard CBOX theme editor, including the background image.  (The option to enter new data or change existing data is non-existent for a number of options).

I have been running into this wall for some time now and am not able to resolve it, in spite of having read the documentation, disabling extra plugins, trying multiple browsers and clearing all of their caches.  I am wondering if anyone else has encountered this issue, and if they have been able to solve it?

The documentation I’ve referred to includes the onboard User Docs (accessed from the CBOX dashboard), as well as the site referenced in the stylesheets themself:

http://infinity.presscrew.com/tutorials/so-youve-installed-infinity-now-what/

which unfortunately appears to point to outdated options, or at least options not present when Infinity is installed under CBOX.
This is how I am attempting to change my settings from the Admin panel:

Appearance -> CBOX Theme Options -> Options tab -> Layout -> Background Image

The following options appear in this section:

Upload Select Zoom Trash

However, while these are underlined, they are not linked to anything, and therefore are dead options.  The ONLY thing that is active is the checkbox for “Disable image, including default”.  There is virtually no way to change the background image.

The “Current Image” still displays the old  bg-body.gif file, even after it’s been deleted, so this is being held in a cache somewhere, or drawn from someplace it shouldn’t be, even though it has been deleted and the browser cache cleared.  This happens in every single browser.  I do not use WordPress caching plug-ins, so there shouldn’t be anything hanging onto the old image.

I tried over-riding this in the Appearance -> Edit CSS section.  While the basic settings are respected, the image itself is completely ignored.  It continues to load the original  bg-body.gif  file.

I then edited the assets/css/design.css stylesheet to point to a new image directly.  Again, this is entirely ignored.

The documentation says that design.css and the other stylesheets in the assets/css folder are  get automatically merged and written to a file called dynamic.css, and that this file is then cached and enqueued on the front end of the site.

* I cannot locate this file anywhere * nor can I find anything to suggest where it should be located.  The onboard documentation references it, but doesn’t indicate where in the tree this should appear.

I then renamed the image.  The new image will load in any browser just fine when it’s URL is typed in directly, so long as it is not named bg-body.gif   The moment it has that name again, it loads the old file, even though it has been deleted and the browser cache cleared.  Again, this happens in every single browser, and again, I do not use WordPress caching plug-ins, so there shouldn’t be anything hanging onto the old image.

• The css files are set to the following permissions:   rw- r– r–
• The image files are set to:     rw- r– r–
• The css and images folders are both set to:  drwxr-xr-x

… so there shouldn’t be anything preventing the reading from or writing to the necessary folders and files.

Is there something I am missing?  Is there some file other than the design.css stylesheet where the background image is being called?  I suspect that if there is infact a dynamic.css file where this and other stylesheets are being coalesced that this is the problem.  I simply cannot find it.

Thanks so very much for any assistance someone might be able to provide to help me troubleshoot this.

Very gratefully,
Susan.

[Christian Wach]

@sbraiden I’ve run into this issue with the CBOX theme options as well and mentioned it in a recent dev meeting. It appears to be a Javascript error in the Infinity uploader script. I can’t say with certainty what I did that returned it to its intended state (since I didn’t have a copy of the site prior to encountering the problem to roll back to) but I may have been simply a matter of hitting “Save All” a couple of times without actually making any changes. If you try that first and it fails, let me know and we’ll dig deeper.

Cheers, Christian

[Susan Braiden]

Christian, thanks so very much for the suggestion.  I’ve actually done this a number of times this past week hoping it was just a screen refresh issue, to no avail.

 

I really appreciate the tip all the same!

 

Thanks a bunch,

Susan.

[Ray]

Try this workaround:
https://commonsinabox.org/groups/help-support/forum/topic/theme-options-issues/#post-3701

Our theme developer is working on redoing parts of the theme options page, so it doesn’t rely so heavily on AJAX. Hopefully, it will be ready by the next major CBOX release.

[Christian Wach]

@r-a-y Unfortunately, I suspect your suggestion won’t work in this case. It’s not that the uploader can’t upload an image (which is another common issue) but rather that there’s a Javascript error on the page which prevents the uploader buttons from functioning at all. It’s the same issue that Jeanette reports in the comment under your workaround advice.

@sbraiden With regard to your question about dynamic assets – if you have access to your wp-config.php file, you can force the CBOX theme to regenerate these by adding the following line to it:

define( 'INFINITY_DEV_MODE', true );

Then reload a page on the site. You should find these generated assets in wp-content/uploads/exports/cbox-theme.

An alternative way to force regeneration is to trash any files in that directory, if you have the permissions to do so. I’d recommend doing both this and defining dev mode. You can comment out or remove the dev mode line from wp-config.php when you’re done.

The uploader problem may not be solved by doing this, however. If not (and you have the Chrome or Safari browser) could you please perform a procedure that will help debugging? Could you open Developer Tools (from View → Developer → Developer Tools) and then reload the theme options page? You should see a red circle with an X in the tools panel – if you click it, it will show you the error that Javascript reports. That would be most useful to know. Please remove anything that identifies your server!

[David Reynolds]

I am having this same problem. The options load fine, but the links – Upload, Select, Zoom, and Trash – are just underlined text. They are embedded in tags but they aren’t active links.

I’m using WP 3.9.2, CommonsInABox 1.0.8, and the associated default theme 1.0.8.

[Scott Voth]

Hi David  @bhamdavid – Does this happen with every background image, or just with a specific one? (For example – Layout, Header, Content, Sidebar, Footer – all have the background image option.)  If you can turn on your browser’s debugger as described by Christian (@haystack) in the thread above, that would help a great deal.  As Christian notes, it seems to be a javascript issue, and it would help the dev team pinpoint the issue.  I just tried setting the Content background in Firefox, and the interface was a little funky, but it did ultimately work.  Also, let us know if you tried Christian’s suggestions, above.

Thanks.

[David Reynolds]

It’s not just the buttons that don’t work. The sliders to adjust settings don’t appear either.

Using the Javascript console in Chrome, I get this error:

<span style=”color: #ff0000;”>Uncaught ReferenceError: jQuery is not defined </span>steelcitymenschorus.org/membersite/wp-admin/load-scripts.php?c=1&load%5B%5D…uery-ui-positio&load%5B%5D=n,jquery-ui-sortable,jquery-ui-menu&ver=3.9.2:2

[Scott Voth]

Hi David  @bhamdavid

Do you have other plugins installed besides CBOX?  Can you try deactivating them to see if it resolves the issue.  It looks like some kind of conflict is preventing jQuery from loading.

@haystack / @r-a-y – would you know what might be going on with David’s site?  Thanks.

[David Reynolds]

I have the following plugins activated:

MailPoet, The Events Calendar, Capability Manager Enhanced, Press Permit, PageBuilder, Ninja Forms, and Force Login.

Deactivating them all and putting the site into dev mode (in functions.php), resolved the problem. I then turned the plugins on, one by one, and after they were all on, everything still worked. However, taking the site out of dev mode causes the problem to reappear. As long as infinit_dev_mode is true, there are no javascript errors.

[Scott Voth]

Hi David – I have added a ticket on GitHub for this – https://github.com/cuny-academic-commons/cbox-theme/issues/216

Hopefully the Dev Team will have an idea about what’s going on.  Thanks for reporting this.

[David Reynolds]

I don’t know if this helps or not. I haven’t really delved into it but it is definitely linked to dev mode. I also use CiviCRM to manage our database of supporters. Recently I was attempting to import a CSV file of new contacts and get hitting a snag. It would only add one contact at a time. I spent a great deal of time working from the CiviCRM end and couldn’t find a single error. I was preparing to take the site offline and really work on it, when I just thought I’d try putting it back into Infinity’s dev mode. Viola. Everything was great after that. I suspect it’s because CiviCRM displays a progress bar, perhaps using similar code to the buttons in your theme options. That bar wasn’t displaying and I think whatever error was generated must have terminated the import loop.

How serious a performance hit is occurring if I just leave it in dev mode? I’m not noticing anything.

[Christian Wach]

Thanks for the extra information @bhamdavid – this is very interesting. I run a few installs of CBOX with CiviCRM and have written a number of CBOX-CiviCRM syncing plugins. However, as you might imagine, I therefore rarely run sites in “non-developer-mode” so this is useful to know and I will get back to you with the results of my investigations.

FWIW, you might be interested in some of the plugins, which work nicely with CBOX:
https://github.com/search?q=user%3Achristianwach+civi

Bear in mind that I’m saying this before I test how CiviCRM runs with INFINITY_DEV_MODE off, but, in principle, once you have rebuilt the dynamic CBOX files (by refreshing the page once) you shouldn’t need to leave INFINITY_DEV_MODE on. For more technical info on what’s going on, please see my response to Scott on the GitHub ticket.

Cheers, Christian

[Christian Wach]

@bhamdavid I’ve tried, but cannot replicate your error with CiviCRM. Which versions of WordPress and CiviCRM are you using? It’s possible that the error was fixed with a later version of the Civi plugin.

[David Reynolds]

I’ve used WordPress 3.9.2 and 4.0, with CiviCRM 4.4.5.

I can work around it, so it doesn’t make CommonsInABox unusable for me. It may be something else causing the issue. I have another issue with CiviCRM not completing certain actions when a WP calendar plugin is active. Any calendar plugin. I’ve tried five or six of them. Something common to them seems to break CiviCRM. For example, when adding a new membership and sending an acknowledgment, CiviCRM will process it when I click Save but it returns a blank page and doesn’t send an email. The membership is recorded in the database, it just breaks somewhere after that point. I’ve worked around that as well.

I’ve got a fresh WP install with nothing added yet. I’m going to play around with that and see what I can figure out.

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