Pique theme color scheme is killing me.

  • Unknown's avatar
    ieba · Member ·

    I’m working hard to get Pique (a full width theme) to work, but these odd color choices it insists in asserting are simply killing me.

    The main problem I have now, after spending a day getting the scrolling static page to look… acceptable,
    is the alternating background colors when dealing with blog items.

    When you click on a blog article from the main static page, it takes me right to that article’s page. It has a light background, so I manually make the text darker for better readability.

    When I click the Latest News menu bar item, I get all the blog posts on one page. Here, the Pique theme insists on making all the background images horribly dark. So now I have dark text on a dark background. Without the images, it’s black or grey.

    If I correct for the Latest News darkness with light text, then when the visitor clicks on an article to read it in full, I’ll have light text on a light background.

    Essentially the Pique theme is broken as-built.
    There’s no way this should work like this.

    I’m really not looking forward to changing themes entirely,
    essentially rebuilding my site from scratch. Again.

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • Unknown's avatar
    ieba · Member ·

    I also e-mailed support about this and they said that I can customize my theme with a Premium or Business plan upgrade.

    But I do not feel that a theme should require a paid upgrade to work properly. It should be designed to _work_ as is. To be completely functional, as designed.

    And, on my blog, Pique fails this basic operability.

  • Unknown's avatar
    siobhyb · Member ·

    Hi @IEBA,

    By default, Pique will change the text of your posts to white on the main blog page, as you can see on the theme’s demo site:

    https://piquedemo.wordpress.com/blog/

    The text is then darker, by default, on individual posts:

    https://piquedemo.wordpress.com/2015/11/10/open-mic-night/

    The reason that these default colours aren’t displaying on your site is that you’ve manually set a darker colour within each of your individual posts.

    You could remove the colours that you’ve manually set and go back to the theme’s default. To do that: Switch to the HTML tab of your post’s editor and then remove the following HTML from your posts:

    <span style="color: #000000;"></span>

    If you don’t wish to use the theme’s default colours, another option is to use custom CSS to override the colours you’ve set for individual posts on your blog page. As you’ve heard via one of my colleagues, the option of adding custom CSS is an advanced customisation option included in the WordPress.com Premium and Business plans.

    Let me know if that helps out or if you have any further questions.

  • Unknown's avatar
    ieba · Member ·

    Ah, I will have to look into this.

    I couldn’t imagine a theme would be designed to have alternating background brightnesses, and not have a way to compensate for it.

  • Unknown's avatar
    ieba · Member ·

    Now, how do I get those big- fat “more” buttons too!

  • Unknown's avatar
    ieba · Member ·

    siobhyb – that indeed did the trick. Now the text from the posts are readable on the Latest News page of all the posts, and each individual post as well.

    Thank you for that as it saved me from having to completely redo the site in another theme. Whew.

    now, about those big buttons for “more…” that are on the demo site?
    https://piquedemo.wordpress.com/blog

    How come I have text?
    And dark turquoise (on a dark background) text at that.

  • Unknown's avatar
    siobhyb · Member ·

    I’m glad that helped you to resolve the issues with the theme’s colours!

    As for the more button: The big button shown on the demo site is used alongside the default excerpts that Pique generates for each post. It’s not used in cases where you use the more tag to create custom excerpts.

    To make use of theme’s default excerpt: Navigate to the Content Options panel of the WordPress.com Customizer and check the option next to “Post excerpt.”

    Hope that’s clear and helps out.

  • Unknown's avatar
    ieba · Member ·

    I’ll check that out. I wonder if I can still have the video clip for each article appear in the “Latest News” page (i.e. in the excerpt) I guess I’ll find out. :)

    Thanks again!

    A lot of things are less than clear with this complex theme.

  • Unknown's avatar
    siobhyb · Member ·

    The videos for each post won’t be displayed alongside the theme’s auto-generated excerpts. Only the first part of each post’s text will be used.

    If you need to use custom excerpts in order to display videos, another option is to use custom CSS in order replicate the look of the “read more” buttons.

    If you do decide to upgrade to WordPress.com Premium or Business then the following CSS would do the trick:

    .blog .more-link {
    display: block;
    margin: 2em auto 1em;
    text-align: center;
}

.blog .more-link span {    
    background-color: #83b6cc;
    border: 2px solid transparent;
    border-radius: 2em;
    color: #eff6f9;
    display: inline-block;
    font-family: Karla, Arial, sans-serif;
    font-size: 15.2px;
    font-size: 0.95rem;
    font-weight: bold;
    letter-spacing: 1px;
    line-height: 1;
    padding: 1em 3em;
    text-shadow: none;
    text-transform: uppercase;
    transition: background-color 0.125s ease-in;
    -webkit-appearance: none;
}

.blog .more-link span:hover {
    background-color: transparent;
    border-color: #83b6cc;
    color: #83b6cc;
}

    I appreciate that the inconsistency with where the “read more” button is used with this theme is confusing and I’ll pass it on as feedback to the theme’s author, also.

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