Document EVERY change you make to a theme in WordPress
Lesson learned.
A theme in WordPress controls how the various elements appear on the page: What goes where, in what typestyle and color and so on.
After almost giving up on the 3-column Relaxation theme I chose for Mind Body Spirit Journal last September, I switched to the new Regulus theme–just to get things rolling.
(I haven’t completely given up on Relaxation and am going to try to find expert help this week to give it one last big shove. If it won’t go, then I’ll junk it.)
Regulus is Ben Gillbanks’ clean, simple looking new theme. It has gone through many, manyrevisions since he released it Nov. 13, 2005. (As I write this, we are on v 2.1.2.) It was at 2.1 as I began playing with it a few days back.
First I read through all the literally hundreds of comments/questions/answers — dialogue between Ben and users. Then I began customizing the theme to get it to work with Mind Body Spirit Journal.
I’m no coding whiz. Discovering which piece of code on which page needs to be tweaked (and how it needs to be tweaked) is painful for me and takes hours and hours and often much experimentation. But when I finally get the result I’ve been going for, I have this great sense of satisfaction. Wow! I actually figured it out!
So…. I made many, many changes to Regulus to get it to where it is this day that I am writing. And I had about six challenges I simply could not figure out. So I posted my first support request to Ben. And he responded quickly. And with a whole new version of Regulus. (It solves a lot of other peoples’ support requests, too, of course.)
And suddenly this seems like a nightmare to me. Because I’ve spent some 40 hours customizing version 2.1. And I did not make a note for myself of each change I made. Where to find it. Which file. Which line. How I changed it. Why I changed it.
So I can’t upgrade to the new version without basically starting all over. Some of the starting over will be relatively easy–because I WILL remember what I did and what to change. And some of it will be about as much of a puzzle to me as it was the first time around….And I’ll have to go chasing through Google trying to find the coding answers that I found before and re-implement them. (Thank goodness for “history.” I won’t have to start anew with Google searches. Simply look at the files I had open on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday and guess which ones might apply.)
Needless to say, grateful as I am to Ben for his industrious support and upgrades, I am not at all eager to tackle rebuilding my site. This looks like a big setback to me. At a time when I’m wanting to charge forward with other MBS Journal things. And other projects.
I WILL open a notetab file and record each and every change I make to a WordPress theme from here on out. I will. I will. I will.
April 28th, 2006 23:47
Ben!
Thanks for looking in and figuring out what I need to change to upgrade the version.
For some reason I didn’t get a notice that I had a comment on this post and so your help has been langoring awaiting moderation.
Yes. It’s a nice theme. And I’m seeing it pretty widely adopted. You’ve got a winner here. Gonna keep an eye on you. Bet you come up with some more amazing WordPress themes.
May 2nd, 2006 11:58
Ben, you got rid of the type cutting through my header image. Thanks.
Don’t know if you’ll see this or not, but I’m not remembering how I did one thing, and don’t know how to do another:
1. Where do I specify how many posts I want to have appear on the main page?
2. How do I get the Categories titles to show dynamically how many posts are in each? Such as, for instance, for the category: “Holistic Marketing Makeover Kit (4)” (if 4 were the current number of posts in that category?)
3. And, bonus question, is there a way in Regulus to let people subscribe to topics so they can follow the comments dialogue or do I need to hunt up a plug-in for that?
Thanks,
ken
May 9th, 2006 10:24
Ben–quick update.
With help of a WordPress angel I seem to have gotten my earlier theme working–at least to a limp-along acceptable point.
Am going to use Regulis for some related sites. Will be downloading the latest version and playing with it.