Welcome to the official blog for the WordPress Support team.
Need help with a WordPress issue? You can find help with your WordPress problem by posting in the support forums or asking on the #wordpress IRC channel.
Want to get involved?
Answering a question in the support forums or on IRC is one of the easiest ways to get started. Everyone knows the answer to something!
We have a detailed handbook to help contributors learn how to work with the forums and IRC.
Weekly Meetings
As well as discussing support issues here on the blog, we use Slack for group communication.
Our weekly meeting is held every Thursday 17:00 UTC, with the first meeting of the month being office hours, and the next will be at Thursday, 17:00 UTC(your time zone) in #forums on SlackSlackSlack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/..
Unlike the other sections of this handbook, Break/Fix is meant to be a hands-on guide to troubleshooting broken WordPress websites. Each lesson represents a common problem you may come across when helping others in the WordPress.orgWordPress.orgThe community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ Support Forums.
In the spirit of learning firsthand how to fix a broken website, each of these lessons is intended to break your WordPress site, as well as help walk you through how to fix it. If you can do it on your test site, then you are well equipped to help someone else if they are having the same problem on their end.
IMPORTANT: Because each of these lessons is designed to break your test site, it is not a good idea to attempt to try any of them on either a live or production siteProduction SiteA production site is a live site online meant to be viewed by your visitors, as opposed to a site that is staged for development or testing.. Install the lesson materials on your locally hosted test site only!
It’s good to bear in mind that the exercises in this section, as with most of the issues you see in the forums, fall into one of several distinct buckets. With experience you’ll start to guess which bucket yours falls into, but for now here is some basic troubleshooting advice for each of the common scenarios you will face:
You can rule out a theme-specific issue quickly by switching to a default theme. If you don’t see the problem with the default theme active then the issue probably related to your theme and now you know where you have to look for the issue.
You can rule out a pluginPluginA plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party-specific issue quickly by deactivating all your plugins. If you don’t see the problem with all the plugins deactivated then the issue might come from a plugin activate them one by one and see if the issue reappears when a specific plugin is activated.
Very often, an issue is specific to one Web browser. Fortunately, verifying this kind of problem is pretty easy to do, and doesn’t require touching your site. All you need to do is check your site in another browser. It’s always a good idea to have at least two or three popular browsers installed on your computer to make sure your site looks right, since not everyone uses the same browser as you. Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari (for Mac) and Internet Explorer (for Windows) are popular browsers.
You can learn more about how to identify and fix issues by reading the fallowing “Break/fix lessons”.
Once you have done that, you can find downloadable lesson materials for installation on your test site, instructions on how to use those materials to break your site, and then some guidance on how to fix it.
Again, have fun, and remember, only for use on test sites.
This handbook would not be possible without the help of these fine people:
Podz
jnhghy
MacManX
jerrysarcastic
In addition, the Break/Fix section of this handbook was adapted from the originals by Mika Epstein, and would not have been possible without the pioneering work from these fine people: