Over at Journey To a Better Man, we use the Swift theme.  So far we have absolutely loved it because it provides some great functionality that helped us to get a clean theme out of the box that has some great and easy customization tools.

Everything was going great, until the theme was updgraded.  All of a sudden everything broke.  I mean, really broke.

The style sheets were completely broken, the sidebar widgets broke, js files were missing. It was awful.

I have tried to reproduce the issues for screenshots, but now that I have fixed everything once I cannot reproduce the issues I was seeing previously.

Style Sheet issue

This issue was caused by something breaking with the header navigation.  The way I fixed this was to go to the Header section of the Swift Administration panel, add my comments back in and re-save the settings. This set the options up correctly and allowed the site to show the theme again.

Broken Sidebar issues

With the broken sidebar I was seeing that the custom sidebar tabs widget was completely broken (see screenshot above).  Since I knew this was JavaScript that created the tabs, I opened up firebug and noticed that there were missing JavaScript files.  Specifically, the files I was missing were from a plugin called WDP Ajax Comments, which for some reason is included directly in with the theme instead of in the plugins directory.  So, I grabbed the files from the WordPress plugins site and then FTPs them to the swift theme directory.  I had to change the folder name from wdp-ajax-comments to wdp-ajaxed-comments.

The other issue I noticed was that I was missing the uploads/swift_custom/swift-js-functions.js file.  So, as a shot in the dark, I grabbed the js-functions.js file from the wp-content/themes/swift/js directory, renamed it and put it into the uploads/swift_custom/ directory.  When I refreshed the page everything was back to normal.

Conclusion

For some reason the upgrade for our site completely failed. I could not find ANYTHING on the Swift support forums that spoke to upgrade issues and I could find no reason why the missing files were deleted.  The only thing I could point to is the upgrade script from WordPress is deleting everything from the directory before upgrading instead of replacing the files individually. This is not ideal, as people make custom changes all the time.

If you have any problems that you would like someone to look at, please feel free to contact us through the comments below or through our contact form.

Matt and I came across a nice business styled WordPress theme called WP-Polaroid.

We both liked the style and format, and with some minor color changes we decided to make it the theme for our Spotted Koi Website.

As I dug into it to make some edits we found a couple strange things.  Like this inside of header.php:

This tidbit of code inside of header.php was acting like it was pulling in an image but instead it was activating a piece of code on the designer’s website.

Although I suspect it’s nothing more than a counter at this time I’m a naturally careful person so I wanted to remove this potential security leak from our website.

In order to do that I went to the ‘Editor’ under ‘Appearance’ then ‘Themes’ on your left navigation bar within WordPress.

Yep, it’s as simple as that, just delete the code shown inside that box, there won’t be any negative side-effects (that I know of!).

Oh, and while you’re here, you might want to check out our post about getting your RSS Feed link correct, because the default one is set to “Adii’s” RSS Feed, not yours!

Having recently installed WP-Polaroid on our Spotted Koi business website we wanted to run through all the links and make some customizations.  We ran across a few oddities (like this one) including a BIG problem with the RSS Feed link.

It seems the designer decided that our RSS Feed links ought to point to HIS RSS Feed, rather than ours.  That’s really not acceptable so we made some minor modifications.

To change this you must go to your ‘Editor’.  You can find the link in the left sidebar under ‘Appearance’.  Make sure you’re editing the ‘Header (header.php)’

Look for the section of code that’s related to the RSS feed:

This is the section of code you’ll replace with this: “<?php bloginfo(‘rss2_url’); ?>”

Make sure you save your file by clicking ‘Update File’

And you’re done!  Now your subscribers will see YOUR RSS feed!

When you get your site set up, or you have your site set up and you have found a theme you like and that fits your website’s purpose, you need to install it.

Just about the only way to install your theme is to use an FTP program to push it to your server into the /wp-content/themes directory.  So, if your theme comes in a directory called “MyTheme”, you will push that entire directory up to the server.  You will now look in the themes directory and see “MyTheme” as a directory there.

Once the files are all up on the server, login to wordpress and choose the Design Tab.

You should see something similar to this:

As you can see on this screenshot, the default “Kubrick” theme is chosen for my blog because it is at the top left corner under the “Current Theme” header.  Also, you can see that there are two other themese available to me.  The “WordPress Classic” theme, and the “SilverLight” theme.  I have uploaded the silver light theme to my server just the way I talked about previously in this article.

WordPress is smart enough, and the designs are built to specification, so that you can see a preview of the theme from this page.  More importantly, you can click the preview to make that theme the current theme on your site. This is particularly handy, when you are a picky person about the themes you use and can’t make up your mind until you see it on your own site.

My suggestion for you is to open one tab of your browser to the Design page on your wordpress admin and open a second tab to the front page of your WordPress site.  (If your browser doesn’t have tabs, download firefox – you will be blown away at what you were missing).  This way, when you change the them from the Design picker, you can go to your live site and refresh the page to see what it looks like.  If you like the one you are looking at, you are done picking your theme.

Next Article: Writing Posts and Pages

———–  Happy 4th of July!! ———

When you first install WordPress you will find that the theme is, well, bare.  While some famous blogs like XKCD (also one of my favorite webcomics) choose to leave their blogs with the original theme, this sort of thing only works for people who already have TONS of traffic coming to their site.

The theme is the first thing that people are going to see of your site, besides the header text.  The reason is that for the most part colors jump out of the page faster for the eye than the text, except for the unfortunate minority of people who are either completely or partially colorblind (I am sincerely sorry about this, but this is the reality of the world).

You can seriously turn away people from your site if you have a theme that either has colors that clash, that is poorly implemented in XHTML & CSS, or that is just plain ugly.  I am one of those people that is picky about a site based on how ugly it is, or how poor the interface is.  My friend even has a site to feature some of the “worst of the worst” in web design that we come across: Who did this Crappy Website. (You don’t want to end up there, even if you just chose a theme from a list…)

When you are choosing your theme there are a couple things you have to think about (I will explain each later):

1. How proficient am I with XHTML/CSS?
2. What are my company’s colors?  What are my colors?
3. How do I want my page to be laid out?  Does the layout I chose make sense for my project?
4. What do I want my site to “say” to a user who is just seeing my site at a glance?
5. Is the template I chose readable?
6. Does the template work in all browsers that I expect my visitors to use?

Questions To Ask Yourself – answered

How Proficient am I with PHP/XHTML/CSS?

• First, the reason why I asked this question: If you like a template but want the color changed, or something moved, you need to know at the very least some CSS.  If you want something to be moved, you might have to know XHTML (if you are lucky) or PHP.

What are my company’s colors? What are my colors?

• I know that second question sounds silly, but really think about it.  You may LOVE the way a theme does its layout, but the colors are hideous.  Are you willing to deal with the ugly colors?
• Also, if you don’t like a certain color scheme, you should be pretty confident that there are other people who don’t like it either.

How do I want my page to be laid out? Does the layout I chose make sense for my project?

• This is important, because you want the most important information available to your visitors to be “above the fold”.  This means, that when the page loads, the important information should be available without scrolling. Think about it this way: when you search Google for a specific keyword, how likely are you to click one of the first 4 links on the page?  How likely are you to scroll?  How likely are you to go to the second page?

What do I want my site to “say” to a user who is just seeing my site at a glance?

• When someone sees a screen shot of your site, or they have a browser window open, or if they are searching for a specific thing on the internet they are going to scan your site quickly.  It is important to take this into consideration.  When someone visits your site, and they leave after viewing one page, this is called a bounce.  You want to prevent people from bouncing off your site.  The more they bounce, the less they read and the less money you can make with your site (if you have monitized your site).
• You want to figure out what the “feeling” is that you want from your site.  It might be serious, fun, exciting, happy, whatever.  You need to consider this feeling when you choose a theme.  When I choose a theme I might pick 10 different themes that I think will work, and then put them on the server.  I will make them active (more on this later), and then decide which one I like when my content is displayed in the theme.  Very rarely do I get it right the first time.

Is the template I chose readable?

• You may have a template that you think is perfect for your mission.  It might be.  But you need to make sure that the widest number of the type of people you will attract can read your site.  If the site uses fonts that are too small, or the background color is too similar or clashes with the text colors you may drive visitors away.  Would you go to a site that was un-readable?

Does the template work in all browsers that I expect my visitors to use?

• Most if not all template sites have a “preview” or “test run” of the templates they have in inventory. Look at your templates in different browsers (Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari).  You might find out that a specific browser does not work well with your template.  This gives you two options 1) find a new template or 2) Fix it (requires XHTML/CSS knowledge).

The next thing you need to do is install your theme, and see if it looks right with your content.  If you use a host that does the 1-click installs like Dreamhost, then you will already have a bunch of themes installed fore free.  Keep in mind though, everyone who uses that host has those installed for free as well…individuality is a good thing to have on the web.

Next Article: Installing and Changing your Themes