RossMitchell

In your wp-config.php file, find the line:
define('WP_DEBUG', false);
and comment it out, then add:

define('WP_DEBUG', true);
error_reporting(E_ALL); ini_set('display_errors', 1);

Now re enable your plugins etc and see what error messages you get. If you need more support just paste the error messages on this thread, or start a new thread.

Suggest that you just try it out and see what happens. Are you happy with how it looks, or can you fix it by customizing the css easily enough ?

I am afraid that you are either in for a good deal of work recreating your website text as best you recall it. OR in this case godaddy wins and your friend is out of pocket $150.

The error I am getting seems to be saying that your WordPress blog cannot access its own database. From your WordPress hosting point of view, the connection is nearly always to a local database and not a remote one. Are you really trying to use a database server which is remote to your hosting server ?

Have you talked with your website hosting support ?

You need to learn to use your web browser’s “browser inspector”, each browser has one (firefox / chrome etc). Using it will show you how your pages are com[posed, how the html and css are behaving. They will even let you easily experiment with some settings.
Then when you have changes you wnt to incorporate, login to your dashboard, then while viewing your page, on the top edge click “customizer” and choose the “additional css” tab.

In your wp-config.php file, please find this line:
define('WP_DEBUG', false);
And change it to:
define('WP_DEBUG', true);
and for good measure add:
error_reporting(E_ALL); ini_set('display_errors', 1);
and for good measure also:
define('SCRIPT_DEBUG', true);

Then with your old theme active, see what your website displays now. Please post whatever it shows here.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 3 months ago by RossMitchell.

I see various ways to do this, essential to all are:
– If a user is new then you must establish their level and subject.
– Otherwise you follow the track that a user is in.
This behavior requires tracking the status of the session, now the concept
of “a session” is very natural to us humans, but is not particularly natural to a web server and browser, they are using “a connection” protocol which is a different thing. Still there are ways of approximating a session in various ways.

Though you may be able to create the required mechanisms using hook functions etc,
I would be creating a child theme instead so that I can take control of manipulating all the page content in its entirety by customizing the page templates.

You could use cookies. This requires that the user is accepting cookies, fails utterly otherwise. I will not follow this line further as I have not used them this way.

I would create a page template that did this:
– If it were a new session I would know because the form variables are not present, so I would present a form that gave the level and subject choices, the view / submit / join button will submit the choices and re-render the page.
– If the form variables are present then create a hidden form and preserve the variables there so th session can be perpetuated. Use the settings to show the relevant menu and fetch the relevant page content. When the user wants to progress to another page, then rather than using a link as is conventional, the action needs to be dressed as a submit button so that the next page request gets to see the form aspects of this mechanism.
– You could instead use javascript (and possibly AJAX) to have the page refresh itself, fetch and render the new content, manage navigation etc. This would require that the user have javascript enabled, it would be possible to show friendly failure messages and explanations when javascript was not enabled.

You could log the IP address and session choices in a custom database table, possibly incorporate the session time to time limit the persistence. Would have to provide for the case where an IP got reused.