Front page changes

  • Resolved troilee

    (@troilee)


    9 years, 8 months ago

    Hi there ??

    First, thanks so much for the theme! I think it’s fantastic. ??

    My question is about the front/landing page. What I want is for it to simply show the blog posts in order from newest to oldest, with the formatting of the post intact.

    What it does is truncate the posts (I only have one post, so I don’t know if it truncates all of them), applies an entirely different set of formatting and tries to display the featured image. If there is no featured image (which there usually won’t be), it shows a huge grey box that says the image can’t be found.

    Obviously, that’s not going to work, but I can’t figure out how to just have it show the blog posts without filtering it through some weird set of formatting rules. In the General settings, there’s an option for the number of words the excerpt shows and what the “read on” button should say. But I don’t want whatever function those are the preferences for to be used at all. I just want the blog posts, as written, as formatted.

    Help please?

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

  • Hi troilee,

    thanks for using MH Elegance lite and we’re happy that you like the theme. ??

    Sorry, what you have in mind won’t work out because the theme displays the posts with excerpts on archives and not the full blog post. In case you want to display full blog posts on archives instead, you might want to use another theme because it’s not how this theme has been designed.

    Have a nice weekend.

    Thread Starter troilee

    (@troilee)

    Thanks for the fast response!

    So, to be clear, the theme is going to force me to always use a featured picture in every post because that is how it must display posts on the main page? And it won’t display anything but the excerpt? So the main page doesn’t have any customization beyond changing fonts/colors? It must display this way?

    That just seems really counter-intuitive. I’m not talking about an archive page. I’m talking about the page you’re shown when you type in the website. I’m forced to use an archive page as my landing page. There’s no work-around to that?

    I’ve never actually seen that in a theme, where you’re forced to use a certain format on your landing page if you want to display your blog posts rather than a gallery. The default I’ve seen is usually chronological blog posts and if you want to do it differently, you can alter the look or the number of posts or whether you want excerpts or not. I’m sort of taken aback that it’s the opposite here. That I’m forced to use this archive format on my main page and can’t make any changes to it beyond aesthetic changes. That seems to be what you’re saying. Is that right?

    WordPress offers two ways of displaying content on archives / blog pages:

    1.) Displaying the full blog post content by using the_content
    2.) Displaying excerpts by using the_excerpt

    This theme displays excerpts because it’s not in first place a normal blogging theme like the default WordPress themes for example. Please keep in mind that WordPress themes can have different purposes and not every theme is the same.

    You might also want to have a look at creating a static front page in WordPress. Because when you don’t set a static front page, 99.9% of the WordPress themes on the market will display the posts page instead (with or without excerpts), which is usually the same as an archive.

    The theme documentation for MH Elegance also might be helpful in understanding how this works.

    Anyway, nobody is forcing you to use the theme if it doesn’t suit your requirements. ?? If you want a normal blogging theme instead that displays the full blog content on the front page, you should use a theme that has been created for that purpose.

    Regarding featured images, there is already an update available which will disable the image placeholder in case no featured image is set. But updates need to be approved by www.ads-software.com admins and that can take a while, but it’s already available for download here.

    Thread Starter troilee

    (@troilee)

    My apologies. I was under the impression that “MH Elegance lite is an elegant and fully responsive multi-purpose WordPress theme which is perfectly suitable for professional business and corporate websites or high-class blogs.”

    If it’s not suitable for blogs, you *really* should change the very first sentence in the theme’s description so it doesn’t flat out say that it *is* suitable for blogs, when you don’t believe that it is. I was simply trusting your company’s word that it is suitable for what you say it’s suitable for. Shame on me?

    I’ve already put in quite a number of hours into customizing the theme for my purposes and aesthetics. I left customization of how the blog posts displayed for near last because, having never been forced into a specific display with themes suitable for blogs before, I assumed it wouldn’t be a difficult fix.

    To be frank, I had planned on purchasing the full version, because there are a number of things offered that I thought would be worthwhile for me (and because, as a creative type, I believe strongly that people should be paid for their work). But I will likely, instead, take your perhaps excellent advice and find a theme that is suitable for blogs, or at least, hope if they say it’s suitable for blogs, that it really is.

    Thank you for your time.

    Sorry, it really seems there is a misunderstanding here regarding the meaning of “blog”. Of course the theme is suitable for blogs and as you probably know, blogging means publishing posts/articles in chronological order (weblog). It doesn’t mean that a blog must always display the full content on archives / front pages.

    Actually when it comes to SEO, displaying the full blog content on archives doesn’t really make sense. Having teasers/excerpts on the other hand reduces duplicate content on your site, increases pageviews and decreases your bounce rate. If you just run a personal blog without commercial background, you probably don’t care about that stuff, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not important. ??

    Anyway, as mentioned before, the theme in first place is a business theme and as you also probably know, most companies nowadays also run a blog and so the theme is suitable for blogs as well. But as said, if you want to run a blog where you want to display the full blog content on archives / front page, you need to use another theme, because in that case the theme isn’t suitable for you. That’s really no big deal at all.

    Have a nice sunday. ??

    @troilee
    Actually you only need to modify the content.php by changing the_excerpt(); to the_content();. ??

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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