And I already have Compatibility Mode enabled. Activating compatibility Mode was necessary for it to work properly on a couple other Enfold theme based sites (non WPML) but it is NOT working here.
Please post your permalink setting
I gave you the pages in my post. You should get https://eastsidegynecology.com/error/ as the 404 and you don’t. Clear as day.
Non-existent URL:
https://eastsidegynecology.com/forms/
Give a search page and not the 404.
Sorry, but nothing is as clear as day.
I did not ask you for the URLs but for the permalink settings. So please navigate to Settings -> Permalinks in your Admin Dashboard and let me know about the current setting.
Also please keep in mind that I’m doing all this for free in my spare time, so please a bit friendlier next time.
Regards,
Peter
That’s exactly what I suspected. A few days ago, I already noticed this problem. If the permalink setting is /%postname%/ or e.g. /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ or anything else, it works fine. Only if the permalink setting is something like /whatever/%postname%/ it does not work. As far as I can say now, the problem is caused by WordPress and not by my plugin. I have to further dig into that. Exact analysis will take some time.
I am already working on it.
Regards,
Peter
Hi Peter, thanks in advance for looking into this. I really see no difference between one of WP’s default options like http://sitename/sample-post/ and a custom structure like we have /%postname%/. It’s all the same as far as I can see where blog posts are reference by their name.
I digged into it and found a bug in WordPress. I’ve reported that yesterday: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/46000. Please change permalink setting to /%postname%/ and test it. I’m pretty sure it will work. You can then switch back to /blog/%postname%/.
I think it should be possible to handle the problem in my plugin. But it is definitely a WP bug and should be solved in WP itself. I’ll wait a few days for response. If it will not be fixed soon, I’ll make a change to my plugin to deal with that error.
Regards,
Peter
Hi Peter, thanks very much for the detailed analysis.
We were set at:
https://eastsidegynecology.com/%postname%/
We are now set at:
https://eastsidegynecology.com/sample-post/
Personally, I don’t see the difference between the two. Either should yield the same effect. However, setting it to what you suggested (rather than the custom setting), makes the 404 page work again.
Thanks for the assistance – FANTASTIC SUPPORT!!
Oh boy, major SEO issue going on now. Changing this removed the subdirectory /blog/ which is where all my blog posts were stored.
I’ve reset it to custom again with the correct /blog/postname/ entry.
I guess I’ll have to wait until you figure out how to get the 404 working again.
A little bit of added info so you can debug this issue.
This URL correctly dumps my custom 404 page:
https://eastsidegynecology.com/blog/whatever/
This URL incorrectly returns a search page:
https://eastsidegynecology.com/whatever/
Not sure if you already know this but hopefully it sheds some light on the matter.
Peter,
Has the issue you were working on been resolved? I see there is a version 9 release but there are no notes on it.
Changelog
8 (2019-01-24)
Gutenberg note added
Hi Peter, still no fix for the custom setting for permalinks? I am still getting a search page instead of your custom 404 page.
Unfortunately there is no response to my support ticket yet – but that’s no wonder at the huge amount of open tickets. I’ll wait a few more days and if nothing happens, I’ll try to work around the problem (which is definitely caused by WordPress itself).
Anyway, I’ll let you know as soon as there is a solution.
Hi Peter, thanks for being cooperative on this. I don’t really think you’re going to get much assistance from their dev crew in any time frame short of a couple of months. That being said, if this is something you can workaround through your plugin in a short time frame, I do appreciate it. We are still running 4.9.8 and I know you tested with 5.0.3 as well.
We’ve gone quite a while already without our custom 404 page and since we are coming up on an SEO company switch soon I am hoping you can do the fix soon. If we go much further out than another week I am going to have to find another option. With our ad budgets we cannot have 404s showing up as search pages.
