Abigailm

Thanks so much — that’s very helpful in a situation with multiple levels of group privileges — but I am looking for a way to take a group member back to whatever page they were trying to reach before they were redirected to the custom sign in page.

So here is what typically happens.

There is a useful, informative page on the web site, Page A.

The group member receives the link to Page A in an email communication — for example, a private email sent to all group member announcing the creation of Page A.

Group member uses the Page A link to go to the site but is not logged in, so is redirected to Page B, which is the custom log in page. I will call this B-1.

Gruup member logs in. Now Page B looks different as it is displaying the appropriate text for members, and some useful links — but it is still Page B. Since appearance has changed with login, I will call this B-2.

I want a way to redirect the user back to page A after a successful login — rather than having to re-enter the URL to Page A or to find it via navigation tools. So ideally I want the user to come to page A, be redirected to B1, and then be redirected back to page A after login rather than ending up on B2.

I am doing this; it’s very easy. You want the free plugin Groups 404 Redirect – https://wordpress.org/plugins/groups-404-redirect/

So you then create a page with a login form, along with whatever notification text you want to include (such as “content restricted – please login to view”)

Then simply set the Groups 404 Redirect to redirect to that page with the first option on its settings page.

I don’t know about SEO but I am using events calendar on a site that offers courses and here is what I have done.

I used the pods plugin to create a custom page type called “course descriptions”. Each course has the course description on the page, and also lists all upcoming event with links. The events are simply put in using a shortcode tied to the category that matches the courses – [tribe_events_list category=””] I believe that this is a pro feature, so you’d have to get the premium upgrade to use it.

The regular event calendar is also accessible from the home page so users really have a choice as to whether they want to read course descriptions or go straight to lists of the courses. So the site is sort of redundant, but once I set up a course description page I don’t have to revisit it again — and I was more concerned with making sure that site visitors could find what they were lookng for easily than SEO.

But the point is, you supplied a link to the site that you say has a problem. When others go to your site, we don’t see any evidence of skewing. So readers of your question would have assumed that you had resolved the problem. It looks like the problem may be specific to your computer or your browser.

@ma3ry — just by coincidence I happen to be using GeneratePress on a couple of sites as well as using Evolve… so I have an opinion. I like the simplicity of GP, so I have chosen it for basic, utilitarian sites — I can get things up and running very quickly.

But straight of the box it’s not very pretty — whereas all the features in Evolve made it easy to create a very attractive commercial site very quickly.

I also do a lot of my own customizations, but it’s pretty easy to customize Evolve with a child theme. The only problem is that I find I typically need to add to !important to modifications in the child theme style.css file to get the changes to stick in Evolve.

For the site that you’ve linked to, I’d recommend staying with Evolve because either way you will be doing your own customizations, but I think Evolve makes it easier to create an attractive site with the built-in features. I just would recommend making styling changes to your child them css rather than relying on in-theme customization options for anything beyond the basics.

@ktsherb2017 — GoDaddy isn’t telling you that there is a problem with this theme; they are telling you that they don’t support any custom themes. It’s not a problem with the theme, but simply that it is beyond the scope of the hosting company’s support to try to debug the theme.

If you want to continue using evolve. I would suggest the following:

1. If possible, create a development copy of the site to work on.

2. Install the WP Rollback plugin. As you work on the site, use that plugin to upgrade and rather than going from 2.6.4 to 3.8.1, work incrementally. I’d start with a 2.6.4 to 3.0.0 upgrade first, if that works, then try a higher version.That will help narrow down the point where things start to break. (But caution – read the theme’s changelog so you don’t inadvertently select a release that had a bug — the changelog will also give you clues as to which versions introduced changes that might impact site layout.

I think that the big problem is trying to make such a major upgrade from a much older version of the site. Although you said that the site had not been updated since 2014, the 2.6.4 theme is actually older than that. V 2.6.4 was issued in November 2013, and apparently had some bugs, because v. 2.7.0 was pushed out 4 days later with “PHP and CSS fixes”.

This is a big project because of the neglect of the site over the years. In your case, it may be less time consuming to start from scratch with a new theme rather than trying to debug the upgrade. You could even do that with evolve — by simply renaming the existing installation to something else, and then doing a clean install of the current evolve theme. That would give you the ability to essentially do a side-by-side comparison by switching back and forth between old and new theme.