Featured image has stopped working for my site
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I haven’t posted to the blog for a couple of years. Now I created some new posts and pages and I find that attaching a featured image to them fails. Previously the featured image would just replace the default header image when displaying a page, but now it just causes the default header image to not appear and the featured image doesn’t appear either.
The site uses the Twenty Ten theme, which I see is now retired. I suspect that is related to my problem. I realize I could change to a newer theme, but I don’t want to do that only to find that it doesn’t fix the problem. I don’t believe I’m setting featured images incorrectly, the process is very straightforward. So is it possible to fix the theme, if that’s where the problem lies?
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Hello there,
This is most likely the cause a bug that wouldn’t see a fix as the theme is long retired.
Because of that I would recommend choosing a theme in any case.
Do you have a site out there you like the look of? Perhaps I can offer some guidance when it comes to theme selection.
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Hello there,
This is most likely the cause a bug that wouldn’t see a fix as the theme is long retired.
Because of that I would recommend choosing a theme in any case.
Do you have a site out there you like the look of? Perhaps I can offer some guidance when it comes to theme selection.
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I see themes which might be okay. So if I choose a new theme, will that be applied to all new posts and pages or will it be applied to all of the existing posts and pages as well?
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Hi there,
For the most part, changing your theme is a lot like changing the clothing on a mannequin. Your content (pages, blog posts, uploaded media) don’t go anywhere or change that much… they just assume the style of the new theme
One exception is the homepage template, as different themes approach setting up the homepage differently, so the settings of your old theme may not apply.
So there can be a bit of setup work (your new theme will come with instructions) but you are hardly “starting over.”Out of curiosity, do you want to share the name of a theme or themes you are interested in? We’re happy to take a closer look and see if there are any issues to be aware of in switching to that specific theme, thanks!
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I looked a bit at Twenty Fifteen (probably because it’s similar to Twenty Ten). And for example Twenty Ten liked the featured image to be a particular size, something like 940 x 198 pixels.
I see Twenty Fifteen has a similar preference but the aspect ratio is different. So what happens to old posts with featured images which I cropped to match the preferred size?
It would be useful to be able to take a theme and see how some of the pages from my website would look in that theme. I haven’t seen anything which does that yet, but it’s likely that I missed it.
Thanks!
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Hi,
I see Twenty Fifteen has a similar preference but the aspect ratio is different. So what happens to old posts with featured images which I cropped to match the preferred size?
The images won’t be cropped. They’ll be resized based on the maximum width the theme allows.
It would be useful to be able to take a theme and see how some of the pages from my website would look in that theme.
You can apply any theme to your site and see how it looks. If you don’t like it, you can easily revert to your previous theme.
In the case of your current theme, which you can’t revert back to, you can create a new site, import your posts and apply the theme you’re interested in. This way you’ll be able to see how your content looks on different themes and keep your main site unaffected.
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Yes, I was thinking that setting up a test site would be the way to go. Thanks for the advice.
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I have looked at about half a dozen themes which look suitable. There’s only one feature which I can’t find.
My existing Twenty Ten theme allows me to build the menu by specifying “Parent Page” and “Order” in the Page Attributes for each page. That automatically builds the menu contents including all of the drop-downs. I don’t see how to make that happen in any of the themes I looked at, instead I have to build the menu tree manually. Even though I put the linking data into the page attributes.
Having to add a new page to the menu after creating it might not be too time-consuming, but having to redo that process for all 750 pages in my existing site would be a lot of work. So hopefully automatically maintaining the menu is a feature which is built into my existing site. When I run the customizer on the existing site it says it doesn’t have any menus.
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Hi there,
I’m not sure there is a way around this, it’s the only theme I can think of that offered this feature, and there is not way that I know of to migrate this kind of menu system, it’s very definitely tied to your specific theme since I can’t think of any others that do this.
Part of the issue is that in the intervening years, the majority of traffic to sites these days come from mobile devices (which really struggle with menus of this size) so it’s fallen out of fashion to create deeply nested menus like this.
I’m going to take some time to to do some testing on this to see if there is a way, but I’m also curious how open you are to having a menu that is not so deeply nested, just in case.
Thanks for your patience!
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It’s true that I haven’t paid attention to where the traffic is coming from. But I just looked at the site through my phone (the first time ever). The menu doesn’t appear there at all, just the header picture and the post or page data.
But at the top left there’s a tool with three horizontal bars and when you click on it you get the menu in its naturally indented form. But it’s the whole menu, all 750 entries, so finding something there is much harder than a drop-down menu. So that’s what “struggle” means there, I guess.
So I don’t think the problem is so much that the menu is deeply nested, it’s more that it’s just too big. It’s hard for me to figure out how to redesign the site so that the menu is more performant.
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… I just looked at the site from a tablet; it does display the menus as a drop-down menu but that’s a clunky thing to use when you have to drag your finger over it to manipulate it. So not only is the menu too big but it’s hard to use.
However every entry in the menu is also a WordPress page, by design, and many of the pages in my site which represent menu items which aren’t leaves of the menu tree simply provide a list of links which echo what you’d see in the dropdown. So really only the top-level menu items are necessary, and then navigation down the menu tree can be done by following links from those pages.
So all of this says to me, just put the top-level menu entries in the updated version of the site. Don’t worry about the rest of the menu entries because (a) they are a pain to use and (b) they are duplicated by what’s in the pages that back them up. And (c) I don’t want to spend a lot of time setting them up in the new theme.
So yes, a radically not-so-deeply-nested menu is the way to go, I think. Thanks for the nudges!
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Hi again,
Thanks for your patience. In my tests, if I convert my site from Twenty Ten to Twenty Fifteen, it does not retain the full menus that you have set up. I had hoped they would convert but it seems you must use the Twenty Ten theme to have this kind of automatic menu.
What I found instead is that if you switch, Twenty Fifteen will display automatically only the top level “parent” pages, and not the child pages (sub-pages) under them, and does not create dropdowns automatically. From what I can see the only way to do that is to manually recreate them, which as you point out is not really reasonable.
However every entry in the menu is also a WordPress page, by design, and many of the pages in my site which represent menu items which aren’t leaves of the menu tree simply provide a list of links which echo what you’d see in the dropdown. So really only the top-level menu items are necessary, and then navigation down the menu tree can be done by following links from those pages.
Thanks for clarifying, I was focused on menus and did not visit the pages directly so I did not spot that. One thing I would like to suggest however is that there is a way to automatically output a list of child-pages on these parent pages by using the List Pages Shortcode: https://en.support.wordpress.com/list-pages-shortcode/
To explain, a shortcode is a bit of code (similar to HTML) that you can use to make a request of WordPress to create an automatic output of some kind.
For example if I were to add this shortcode to your South America page:
[child-pages]It would cause this list to display automatically:
That is a lot (on my test site it scrolls for quite a while) but the code could be modified to control this. If I were to use this instead for example:
[child-pages depth='2']It would create this list of pages (under South America) that is only 2 levels deep:
So if you wish, you could set up lists on each of your top level pages using this code. Because the list is generated automatically it would be up to date with any new pages you add as well. Essentially you would use your same workflow, but the changes would show up on your main pages instead of the menu of your new theme.
To add the shortcode, you will need to use this block: https://wordpress.com/support/wordpress-editor/blocks/shortcode-block/
Hope this gives you some ideas to move forward! Please let us know if you have any more questions.
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