Theme advice
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Hi timethief (or anyone else who might have some advice) – I don’t think my previous post here was a duplicate – I’m trying to find a theme that I can switch to. I was hoping the theme god(desse)s here might know of one or more themes that dont use that ‘featured’ tag, yet manage to highlight up to 5 old posts. Do you know of any that can do that???
(To me this is a separate issue from when and how the featured tag problem might be fixed – I will definitely only post on that in my earlier thread in the Support forum)
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hi there,
I typed featured tag into https://wordpress.com/themes/free?s=featured+tag and got a display of several themes.
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I suppose one could use that search and assume the rest of the free theme do not have the featured tag feature.
For further help you will need to get Theme Staff support help by typing modlook into the sidebar here.
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P.S. I found more free themes that may suit you by using a featured posts search https://wordpress.com/themes/free
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Thanks for that idea – it never occurred to me to do a ‘reverse’ search, that is brilliant. I will check your links…
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Sorry timethief, I had forgotten to subscribe so didn’t see your question til now.
I did check out some themes using your sifting ideas, but I couldn’t find any yet that seemed like what I want. I think I have to back off of this til next month, have a sort of a deadline rearing up the weekend of the 4th and trying to get the next post done too. So if I can’t find something in a few weeks I’ll resurrect this thread and type in Modlook…
Thanks for your good ideas! -
@ingridcc: I’ve looked over your threads and am sorry that we’ve not yet been able to track down the cause of featured tags going missing.
I spent some time trying to replicate the issue today but haven’t been able to, either. As we collect more and more reports, we’ll have a better change of replicating and then pinpointing the fix.
All of our newer themes rely on a featured tag to highlight posts. So, if it’s important for you to highlight some posts then there isn’t a good way to avoid featured tags.
It would be useful, however, to know if the issue continues to come up on a different theme. And it could be a good opportunity to refresh the look of your site every. :)
If you have an idea of what you’d like from a theme or any other sites that you’d like to emulate, I’d be happy to come up with some suggestions from our repository.
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thanks @siobhyb.
If I do switch would I be able to switch back again down the road, given that Expound is a retired theme??? I love the way Expound displays my posts on the home page – it’s perfect for a tutorial-based teaching site, where I want to keep some of the most basic ones up front and center along with the most recent one. I couldn’t really see any I liked as much when I did a quick prowl-through the other day, but I will be looking more after my busy spell is over in a few weeks. -
@ingridcc: You’d be able to switch back via the Themes section in /wp-admin, yes. :)
I’ve come up with a few suggestions that you can look over, whenever you have the time:
1. You can feature posts at the very top Gazette in a nice visual way, though the featured posts rely pretty heavily on imagery.
2. Canard is another magazine-style theme that would enable you to feature posts at the very top and can be very visually striking if you use images in your posts.
3. Apostrophe 2 is a nice, minimal theme which, again, would enable you to feature posts at the very top.
Happy to come up with some other suggestions if you’d like, also. :)
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@siobhyb thanks for those suggestions.
It sorta seemed like the ones you mention just show a post title with the image for each post on the homepage. I would prefer to be able to have a paragraph of post excerpt be displayed along with each image on the home page.I like the look of Baskerville 2, and it lists “sticky post” as a feature, but when i did “preview” only two of my 3 posts marked sticky seemed to be up there. Or maybe only 1, since my most recent post is one of the ones I’ve marked sticky and it would be featured up top regardless.
I really want first time visitors to see my Welcome post, my Start Here basic tutorial post as well as my most recent post, and at least one more important tutorial – all ‘stuck’ or featured up above of all the other posts. Does Baskerville only allow 1 sticky post?
Also, the minimal description of the theme says it supports post excerpts, but even though I have post excerpts set in the post excerpts module for all my posts, on “preview” with Baskerville 2 they all came out with the full post showing on the homepage, would I have to go through all my post excerpts and redo them if I switched?
So far, every time I’ve switched themes there has been a massive amt of work to do afterwards in setting up widgets and other things that didn’t seem to transfer over easily. That is why I really hesitate to take that step.
If I change themes and then later change back to my current theme, will it revert to all the same widgets/ colors/ menu/ header image/ layout it has now? or will it be like starting all over again in the theme?
Thanks!
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I am using Baskerville 2 for a student publication in my Communications class https://riptidesimonsrock.wordpress.com/
We have a few problems we can’t resolve.
1. The theme automatically pulls whatever the first few words of the post are, even if they are picture captions. How to have control over what is posted on the homepage excerpts?
2. How to do embedded photo captions?
3. We can’t get the sidebar widget menu to show up on the homepage. This is frustrating because we want people to be able to search the site by category.
I hope you can help us out!
Jennifer ((email visible only to moderators and staff))
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@jbrowdy: I’m glad to see you got help with your question here.
@ingridcc: I’ve broken down your questions below. Let me know if I missed anything!
I like the look of Baskerville 2, and it lists “sticky post” as a feature, but when i did “preview” only two of my 3 posts marked sticky seemed to be up there. Or maybe only 1, since my most recent post is one of the ones I’ve marked sticky and it would be featured up top regardless.
I can confirm through my own testing that Baskerville 2 supports multiple sticky posts. All three posts that you’ve marked as sticky will appear at the top of your site’s posts page.
Also, the minimal description of the theme says it supports post excerpts, but even though I have post excerpts set in the post excerpts module for all my posts, on “preview” with Baskerville 2 they all came out with the full post showing on the homepage, would I have to go through all my post excerpts and redo them if I switched?
I also tested excerpts on my own site and can confirm that custom excerpts you set will display alongside posts.
So far, every time I’ve switched themes there has been a massive amt of work to do afterwards in setting up widgets and other things that didn’t seem to transfer over easily. That is why I really hesitate to take that step.
I definitely understand your hesitation here! Have you ever considered setting up a completely separate and private test site? You could use that test site purely to experiment and familiarise yourself with a different theme before making the switch on your own site.
We have some tips and tricks for setting up a test site here:
If I change themes and then later change back to my current theme, will it revert to all the same widgets/ colors/ menu/ header image/ layout it has now? or will it be like starting all over again in the theme?
You’d need to set up those theme-specific settings like your widgets and custom colours again, yes. They wouldn’t be automatically restored along with your old theme.
Let me know if you have any extra questions on the above.
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Thanks @siobhyb for the sticky post info.
I do have a “test blog” (copy of an older version of my blog’s content) but even that takes more time than I can invest til after my upcoming deadline goes by. Last night I tried my test blog out with Gazette – took over an hour of fussing to find out that it would look terrible with my content. A custom header ends up several inches below the featured content, and shrunken widthwise so it doesn’t even cross the whole screen! (how can that be considered a ‘header’?) That was after a lot of fussing with featured content and post excerpts (my existing ones were ignored)/ ‘more’ tags…
Thanks for your info, though, I’m saving it to look into next month… -
I hope everything goes smoothly with the upcoming deadline! Do let us know if we can be of any help with extra questions when you’re able to spend time on your theme switch.
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