A realization dawned while working on the blog yesterday to make it fully https compliant. The number of php code tweaks I’d made in the last year had basically somewhat broken the theme’s baseline that it no longer correctly recognized the theme’s version. Normally, that’s no big deal – except that the theme’s author has been quite diligently pushing up updates and improvements to the base theme, and an incorrect version number meant that WordPress could no longer update the theme with bug fixes and patches. Major bummer.
That was as good a time as any to shop around for a new base theme. The subscription with the previous theme authoring company provided all its professional-level themes for a one-time payment – hooray for that – though I reckoned that only just one or two were finally suitable for the type of blog this this. So, after some scouting around, I found one base theme which apparently is extremely popular among WordPress web sites, and supporting enough customizations through its built-in dashboard so that blogs using the same base theme won’t look too alike.
A purchase and quick installation to my host server done, and after about an evening or so of exploring theme options and making adding further custom css code snippets, the first version of this new look is broadly done. Some of the major differences from the old to new theme include:
A main page slider that is easier to maintain. The old theme slider required having to re-associate every single featured post whenever I wanted to add something a new post to the chain. That was extremely painful!
A related post section with image thumbnails.
Better automatic scaling to fit different viewing platforms (basically desktop, tablet, and smartphone).
There’s still a lot of further tweaks I’ll like to make though, including:
Changing the color for selection text on the sidebar widgets. It looks too washed out.
Removing the featured image in post lists.
Adding grid post box colors for the main page.
Seeing if I can reduce the size of the main page slider. It’s huuuugggeee!
Completely re-doing the Travelling summary page: it’s way too long now.
So, yet more changes to come soon on the blog theme!
Looking good!
Still extremely buggy, bud LOL. For some reasons, several images aren’t loading responsively on mobile browsers. Have to find out what’s causing it!