Wordpress Nimbus Business Theme not displaying Page Content or excerpt under the featured pages

I've recently been using a different set of Wordpress Themes and one that I quite like it by Nimbus. (http://www.nimbusthemes.com/free/business/)

Sadly, the theme doesn't actually work out of the bag - and it seems to be down to shoddy coding (sorry guys, I even found the post you made on the wordpress site to have it featured and even they told you it wasn't working!)

It seems to be because when they load page content, it doesn't check if there's anything and then continue to load.

To fix, do the following:

1: Navigate to the following file:
themes\business-theme\page.php

Find the following line:

<?php the_content(); ?>

Delete the whole line and replace with:

 <?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post();
the_content();
endwhile; endif; ?>

And that should fix it

The excerpt bug seems to be something to do with a function called "chop_text" which doesn't seem to work properly. Rather than debugging why, I changed it to the built in wordpress function - wp_trim_words (why did they bother remaking it?)

Load the following page:

themes\business-theme\parts\frontpage-4boxes.php

Delete this:

 if (is_home()) {
            $content = chop_string(get_post_field( 'post_content', get_option( 'page_for_posts' ) ));
        } else {
            $content = chop_string($post->post_content);
        }

Replace with:

 if (is_home()) {
            $content = chop_string(get_post_field( 'post_content', get_option( 'page_for_posts' ) ));
        } else {
            $content = chop_string($post->post_content);
        }

Problem solved

considering this is the free demo it doesn't bode well.

But then it is a nice theme :) A very specific set of fixes but perhaps it will help someone - remember to +1 me if it does!

Slow HP Envy Laptop - High spec but very slow/sluggish performance

I've had a few clients come to me with HP Envy laptops that they have purchased in the past - and I started to realize that they were all complaining about the same thing: performance

The laptops themselves are pretty good specs - Intel i5/i7 8GB RAM and even a GT740M graphics card. CPU and memory usage looks good, but just using it for average tasks eventually slows it down to a crawl.

What gives? These are good laptops - certainly not cheap entry level units

Simple answer - the HDDs in them suck. 

All the laptops that had these problem had one thing a common : a HGST 1TB 5400RPM disk

I have to wonder why HP are selling such laptops with a low spec drive? The easy solution was to replace the drive with an SSD. Thankfully, replacing the drive in these units is very easy - you only need to remove a single screw.

Perhaps quite obvious, but you wouldn't expect a laptop of this level to come with a drive such as this. 

Below - one of the offending drives!

Help for setting up a btnet leased line with a Cisco 2921 and FSP150CP

I recently helped a client who had a btnet leased line installed - BT turned up to the property, installed a Cisco 2921 router connected to a FSP150CP showed the client it was working with their laptop and promptly left with a few notes as to IP address and mask.

The client was a little confused to say the least! I was asked to help - and many other people may find themselves in a similar situation.

Firstly, you will need a few things:

• IPv4 Network Address (You should have been sent this in advance, if not ask the engineer installing)
• IPv4 Network Mask (same as above)
• Something to take care of NAT and act as a firewall (we used a Draytek Vigor 2830)

To work out your range of external IPs, you can use your network address and mask with a subnet calculator (such as http://www.subnet-calculator.com/)

The following has been created using the following IP addresses - you will need to enter your own instead for this to work! Be sure to change them and use the subnet calculator above if you need your entire range.

If our Network address is: 81.14.198.192 and our mask is 255.255.255.248 then our range is: 81.14.198.193 - 81.14.198.198 (to work this out, enter the address and select the mask on the calculator - the bottom then gives you the range)

In this instance, BT put their Gateway device on 81.14.198.193 (the first available IP from the available range) therefore you have 194 to 198 as external IP addresses to use.

So how do you get your kit working?

Get your firewall/router and plug a cable from the GE 0/1 port on the Cisco into the "WAN" port on your router. Ensure that this is a WAN port that takes a network cable and not a telephone one, as this is for ADSL or VDSL.

Now login to your own router, and set it a static IP address for Internet Access. The routers IP can be any of the addresses from 81.14.198.194 to 81.14.198.198. Enter the subnet address as: 255.255.255.248 and the Gateway address as 81.14.198.193.

And that should be it - there are a lot more things that can be done but these are the basics to get things working.

I hope it helps someone

On a more personal note, I did all of the above correctly for my latest setup of this equipment but couldn't get any data to move in or out of the router. Long story short, BT managed to assign the gateway device (The Cisco) with the range IP instead of the first available IP address! After a few calls to BT it was sorted and everything magically started working.