Fix Courses page throwing 404 in Hello Elementor theme

[Imran92]

Resolves #7678

Proposed Changes

When using the Hello Elementor Theme, our Courses page (/courses-overview) threw a 404.

To explain the reason, we should know that Sensei handles the Courses archive page very differently than usual.

When a request comes to render the Course archive page, we override the usual flow of the request, and handle it using this class. From an archive request, we change it to a single post request, so every plugin or theme after that point considers and handles the request as a single page request. And, as the global single post to be rendered, we set a dummy post, the content of which is whatever we want to render, In this case, a custom content we generate by rendering the blocks from the page from "Settings -> General -> Course Archive Page" setting.

The issue here is not because of the content, but rather, because of the properties of the global wp_query to go with the single post we set. Notice that we set up all the properties to imitate that of a single page, is_singular and is_page is set to true and is_archive is set to false.

Now check out this code in Hello Elementor. This is where it decides which template to choose. Notice that, to render the single template, it requires the is_singular check to be true. But even though we set is_single, we don't set is_singular to true. Which causes the is_singular check to fail. Thus, it falls back to the 404 template. So, setting is_singular to true fixes the archive rendering issue, and Hello Elementor starts using the single template as we want.

Notice that we've also removed queried_object_id. It's because once we set "is_singular" to true, this WP Core check also starts passing. So it tries to fetch the dummy post again from the database using get_post() using the id from the queried_object_id, where it doesn't exist. So it gets a null object, and subsequently throws an error. So I've removed the queried_object_id to prevent it from happening.

Testing Instructions

1. Install the "Hello Elementor" theme.
2. Go to the Courses archive page
3. Make sure it renders without any issue
4. Add a couple of courses to a category
5. Check the category Course list from frontend to make sure it doesn't throw any error when the archive is rendered under taxonomy (One way to render courses under category is to click on the category tag that's shown on each course in the course list)
6. Now create a copy of the Courses page, give it a different name and permalink. Set this new pages as the course archive page from "Settings -> General -> Course Archive Page"
7. Try to access the new page and make sure it doesn't throw a 404
8. Test the above steps in all top themes to make sure no regression has happened.
9. Try to think about any scenario where it can cause a regression.

Pre-Merge Checklist

• PR title and description contain sufficient detail and accurately describe the changes
• Acceptance criteria is met
• Decisions are publicly documented
• Adheres to coding standards (PHP, JavaScript, CSS, HTML)
• All strings are translatable (without concatenation, handles plurals)
• Follows our naming conventions (P6rkRX-4oA-p2)
• Hooks (p6rkRX-1uS-p2) and functions are documented
• New UIs are responsive and use a mobile-first approach
• New UIs match the designs
• Different user privileges (admin, teacher, subscriber) are tested as appropriate
• Legacy courses (course without blocks) are tested
• Code is tested on the minimum supported PHP and WordPress versions
• User interface changes have been tested on the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox and Safari
• "Needs Documentation" label is added if this change requires updates to documentation
• Known issues are created as new GitHub issues

[github-actions]

Test the previous changes of this PR with WordPress Playground.

[github-actions]

Test the previous changes of this PR with WordPress Playground.

[github-actions]

Test the previous changes of this PR with WordPress Playground.

[donnapep]

@Imran92 This seems to work. 🙂 Curious if you tracked down the original PR where this change was introduced to gain an understanding of why it was added in the first place and ensure that we didn't reintroduce a bug? I did some testing based on the original PR and everything seems to work fine. 🤞🏻

[donnapep]

Approving but I did add a comment.

[Imran92]

@Imran92 This seems to work. 🙂 Curious if you tracked down the #3704 where this change was introduced to gain an understanding of why it was added in the first place and ensure that we didn't reintroduce a bug? I did some testing based on the original PR and everything seems to work fine. 🤞🏻

Hi Donna! Thank you so much for checking the PR and testing for possible unidentified side effects so thoroughly.

Yap I did check all the previous relevant PRs. The PR that first introduced this issue was this one actually. I think we just needed the queried_object to be set, not the queried_object_id. That's why it caused some notice issue that were visible on the Taxonomy pages. Which you fixed with this PR, by preventing setting the queried_object_id on tax pages. My PR can be considered just an extension of the same PR which just fixes the issue for non-tax pages as well.