Recently I wanted to add a small, yet nice looking gallery of work to my site, specifically to my About page. Although I do use and advocate for Elementor as a product (especially for non coders) I didn’t much like the galleries on offer there, and I am generally not one to use “non Elementor created” add-ons.
I decided to go with FooGallery as I like the typical style it uses and had used it years previously, with good results.
Adding the gallery itself is a breeze, and I was organised enough to have all of my images sized to what I liked, so creating a carousel with a half dozen or so images of websites I had either created, or designed and created, didn’t take too long at all. Thinking it would be good to also have a link to the website, I carefully added custom URLs to each of the images in the gallery.
Check the Gallery Settings, Thumbnail Link
I am using the Carousel style gallery, so one thing to check here is that the Thumbnail Link setting (at the bottom of the General settings of the Gallery) is set to “Custom URL”.
I figured once done, I could save the gallery, view it on the live page, and people could click through to the real deal. WHAT A FOOL I WAS!!
Check the Lightbox Settings
With the above set, you also need to check the Lightbox settings on the Gallery itself (not the general Foobox settings) and set this to something other than the default; set it to FooBox.
This solution was found largely thanks to a WordPress support topic, found here, but part of me wanted to write this blog about it if for nothing other than to remind myself this issue existed!
Once then saved and page loaded, the custom URL was working as expected.
I hope you found this helpful! If so, please share with your socials, or let me know if you run into any issues in the comments section.
A shared folder in OneDrive now acts like a browser shortcut (for some users)
It came to my attention a few weeks ago (mid June 2024), from a customer of mine, that they were having an issue with a OneDrive shared folder. The customer is using Microsoft 365 Family. This is despite following the instructions to have the folder(s) that are “shared with me” added as a shortcut to the local OneDrive folder.
The problem is that with one member within the Microsoft 365 Family, the folder no longer acted like a regular local folder via File Explorer. Instead, the folder looked like a shortcut (little blue arrow bottom left corner) and when clicked on would open the online/Browser version of OneDrive. Other family members are not affected (yet) and the issue appears to affect both Windows and Mac users, and is not necessarily tied specifically to the version of OneDrive. Meaning, all computers are using the same version of OneDrive (Build 24.126.0623.0001, 64-bit), yet just one family member cannot see the folder shortcut as they normally would.
This remains a cause of frustration for the customer (now into July 2024), due largely to a loss of productivity and apparent apathy from Microsoft. I have seen it stated that a support response has been along the lines of, “well you can edit the document in the browser version of OneDrive”. This only works if the file has a browser based editor though, as otherwise the user must download the file, edit it locally, and re-upload, all while hoping someone else isn’t doing the same thing. Not good enough, Microsoft.
Anecdotally it may only affect Personal and Family users, and not Office 365 Business users. This merely flames the conspiracy fire as people look to explain as, “Micro$oft forcing people onto higher paying plans and prevent very small business from using 365 Family”.
Whilst it seems Microsoft do acknowledge the issue, at time of writing there has been little information by way of updates on progress or any indication as to when a fixed version will be available (or really, what users would need to do, if anything, once a fix is released).
More can be seen about it in several Microsoft supportforums, or Reddit posts. No doubt found elsewhere as well, as people start to turn to alternative solutions such as Dropbox and Google Drive.
My own testing
I think the issue somehow lies with the OneDrive account.
I have come to this conclusion after trying numerous things to fix the issue on one laptop, which included:
removing the shared folder from the problematic computer, and re-adding it
removing OneDrive completely and reinstalling it
Taking the access away from the laptop user, removing the folder from the laptop, and re-applying everything
Performing a fresh install of Windows on the problem laptop
None of the above worked.
Really I should have tried the following before doing the Windows reinstall (purely to save time):
I logged into the problem laptop as a different family member, one that was not having the issue. It worked! The OneDrive shared folder was behaving as it should.
Out of curiosity I then logged into my own laptop as the “problem” user, and I could now reproduce the issue locally.
I decided then to share the problem folder with my own Microsoft account, logged back into my laptop as “me”, and OneDrive was back to normal and the shared folder was behaving as expected.
My loose workaround
From this, I concluded that the issue actually lies with the account associated with OneDrive, and not strictly the operating system or version of OneDrive.
Theoretically therefore, if I could share the folder again with a new account, then maybe the issue would go away (if albeit temporarily).
This worked! A bit of a hassle as I wanted to make sure the new account had enough OneDrive space and therefore added into the Family (luckily had spare licenses) and there isn’t much else this user needs to do within OneDrive other than access this one shared folder, but it worked and now the problem laptop is logged into OneDrive (and OneDrive only) as the new account.
Now that I’m typing this out, the Microsoft 365 Family license might not need to be used, so I’ll see if this can be done away with.
The key to it all though (as I see it) was to have the new account created, and the OneDrive folder shared with them. Perhaps this method will help someone else? I’d love to hear if it did or if you have another workaround!
Please share in your social network if you found this helpful.
I was working on a project where I was transferring to a different CMS (WordPress), and the original blogs all had “blog” in the URL. I wanted the same format in the new site, figuring this was the best thing to do for existing SEO.
However, the new WordPress site is also using Custom Post Types (CPTs) and I didn’t want to affect the URLs of those posts. My instinct was to change the Permalink Settings to add “/blog” to the front, but this also affected the CPT URL.
Checking with my good friend Google seemed to take me longer to find the solution than expected, and admittedly I may be just stupid, but I thought I’d write this to see if it helps anyone else in the same, or similar, situation.
Why not use a Custom Post Type plugin to handle this?
It is highly likely that a decent Custom Post Type plugin would be able to handle this “out of the box”, however I had already created the post type somewhat manually, using what I think is a very nifty little plugin called WPCode which typically means for me less plugins installed overall (seriously, check it out, it’s great).
Ultimately it meant I had basically entered the CPT code manually, but obviously had something missing that might allow me to “strip” or ideally “ignore” this starting part of the URL structure.
Links high up the Google SERP had me looking at various Custom Post Type plugin solutions, or more like stripping it after the post was published or upon retrieval which seems like a slow way of doing things (or if not slow, less efficient), meaning doing something via the functions.php file.
Finding what I thought was going to be my answer, as it at least spoke about the Post Type registering process, only gave me half the answer and contained my bug bear (one of many) of typically developers (yes I am looking at mostly ALL of you developers out there!) that tend to post incomplete code snippets under the assumption that I am smart enough to figure out the rest. Well I am NOT, dammit!
My answer with a more or less complete code snippet
My Custom Post Type is Projects. I want the URL / slug to appear as “project”, so something in the line of https://mysite.com/project/project-post-title.
So in my arguments array, the start of which looks like below:
// Set other options for Custom Post Type
$args = array(
'label' => __( 'Projects', 'responsive-mobile-child' ),
I had the following right at the end or the array:
'rewrite' => array( 'slug' => 'project'), // my custom slug
);
Which worked perfectly fine until I changed the Permalink structure as per above, which meant I now had https://mysite.com/blog/project/project-post-title.
Not cool, and probably not ideal for SEO considering the original “projects” had the more desirable URL.
All I had to do though was slightly edit that rewrite line, so it now included ‘with_front’ => False and now it looks like this:
Saving the Permalink again at this point seems a good idea, so after doing that my “Projects” all had the appropriate URL (with just “projects” in the URL) and my regular posts have “blog” in the URL.
Huzzah!
Hope this has helped someone, and if any more explanation, or code snippets, are required then feel free to get in touch. And don’t forget to share!
