we have numerous users using S2 member…  but of course, cannot say for sure if they use blog linking or experience same issue…

we used to work closely with Oliver from cforms but he seemed to abandoned it long ago… would be good to hear he has picked it back up… or, frankly, if someone else has…

hell, we love our ‘dumb’ users… since we know simple press inside and out, we love hearing from others to help us with our bias and blindspots…

they can reach us at support at simple-press dot com…  happy to work through and potential issues…

I took some time on the blog linking problem and I guess, I could narrow down the problem.

First, S2 Members does not seem to be involved in the problem. I removed the page lock from the blog post involved and tried again – same error message as above.

My option in the admin panel was all the time: “WP post excerpt field”, because I dont want to copy content to the forum, I even dont want an excerpt.

Just  for testing I changed to: “Excerpt from post content” and to my surpise it worked like a charm. Even with S2 Members page restriction.

So now its your part again.

The problem and above error message is related to the “WP post excerpt field” option only. It is not a general problem of the blog linking plugin.

What I am looking for is simple, but important to me: I want two permanent links linking to each other více versa – and no copied content, not even an excerpt. One link from the blog post to the forum topic. And one link from the forum to the blog post. Thats it.

How do I get this accomplished?

So – the ‘WP post excerpt field’ was actually empty which explains the error condition and was the question I first asked.
Ans that is how blog linking works. It takes a copy of the post content – or the excerpt – and creates a new topic with that as the first post. No content – no topic. You can not create a topic without an initial post.

Ah shit…. this is the added complexity of a different language.

I understood/expected something different under the “WP post excerpt field” term and I always have to guess how to translate such hints from english, as I run wordpress in german and therefore cant see the english term for all the options. I dont even have this concrete field activated in my wp editor environment, cause I never use it.

And as there was no further explanation about that option in your admin panel, I assumed something under this term, that was obviously a wrong assumption.

After your comment, I googled for it and checked my “WP Screen Options” in the editor at the top, whether there is a “excerpt field” to checkmark or whatever the german translation will be.

Funny thing is: I found none. lol. Who ever did it, “someone” stole my excerpt field and I never recognized that, as I never used it.

And I cant recognize a field to be empty on your question, that I neither see, nor know that it exists. 😉

Case closed. User error. lol 🙂

But I am still wondering, where my excerpt field is gone. Now that I know there should be one….

PS:

btw, is there a way to set the number of words in the excerpt to zero? I tried, but this seems to result in a standard length instead of zero. A small number works, but not zero in my environment.

Well this depends…. were you writing a WP Post or a WP Page? Because to my embarrassment I have just discovered that Pages do now allow or an excerpt – at least it looks that way – which surprises me a little as I am pretty sure I have used one in the past and the database column is still available for one. So if you are looking on the write Page screen then you wont find the except. If Posts and it is not there then you are right – something is removing it.

If you mean can the SP excerpt be set to zero then no – that would still result in no content which fails validation.

As with everything in WP and – by extension – SP – there are filters which can probably be employed to change the content but there has to be some content.

Lol. That is true “Murphys Law”.

Yes, the error occured when writing a Page! And I was checking a Page for the field.

Now checking a “Post”, the excerpt field is there, just not activated in my installation via options.

Reason why I was never missing the field is, that S2 Members heavily relies on the <more> tag and that is the only way I define my excerpts. So as I was never in need of an “excerpt field” I was not even aware, that one exists.

Anyway, funny thing with us both to some extend right and wrong at the same time.

But now I understand the concept and the limitations of the “Linking Plugin” and I can live with that.

Case closed from my side. Have a nice day.

Mmmm. 🙂 I have opened a ticket on the issue for fixing of course.