What does one do when a theme isn’t updated???

Hi, Karen:

In my opinion, the best thing to do when a theme is no longer supported by the developer (which appears to be the case with Montezuma), is to switch to another theme. Not only because it may become incompatible with future versions of WordPress, but more importantly, there may be some security flaw that might become exposed in the future, and it’s best to use a theme that is being constantly updated.

I’ve been evaluating other themes, and it’s difficult because I haven’t found another theme that is as easily customizable as Montezuma. I’ve switched one over to Twenty Fifteen and I’m looking at switching another to Startup Blog, but, of course, the theme you pick is going to depend upon which features are important to you.

And, yes, you probably won’t find any other theme that does the same color splitting of the page titles, but you might be able to copy the code from Montezuma into a Javascript plugin to produce the same effect.

• This reply was modified 7 years ago by CrouchingBruin.
• This reply was modified 7 years ago by CrouchingBruin.

Hi, it’s so lovely to see you !!!

Sigh. Yes, I expect you’re right. I’ve looked at 2015 before. I think the main difference is the sidebar being on the opposite side. But, I know very little about anything other than the obvious.

Are you going to do the javascript thing? I really like that look.

How well will a site “transfer” from Montezuma to 2015, do you think?

I’ll check out StartUp now…

??

Karen

I’m a little unclear… can we just download one of them, and try it out???

I’m so incredibly ignorant about this stuff… ??

Looking at themes is somewhat confusing. So far I’ve been afraid to download one to my site. I’m going to try them on my small site… Grow Your Vitamins…

OMG… installing Startup Blog… my site would have to be totally remade, or I don’t understand something about this process…

2015 looked as if it would work, but when I went to an actual page it was a mess. So, I went back to Montezuma and the sidebar is gone. On the other hand, it seems as if the pictures are aligning correctly, though I haven’t updated to 4.9.4

This is VERY tricky.

I just checked out the forum on Bytes For All… end of the theme… Is there other one more compatible with Montezuma???

I’m overwhelmed by how different the other themes make my site look, and not in a good way.

This is pretty interesting. This guy did loading times for all the themes
https://allthingsblogging.com/fastest-wordpress-themes/

Nice article, I’ll take a look at some of those themes, but I would probably not use a theme that hasn’t been updated in the last two years. For example, of the top ten themes listed in the article, only two have been updated in the last two years. Of course, there’s no guarantee that any theme will continue to be updated in the future. Right now, Iconic One looks like a theme worth exploring.

Hi
Of the ones he listed the first two I searched for on WordPress resulted in Nothing Found… I may have done it wrong…

I’ll check IdonicOne out. I just tried 2017 and it works fairly easily. I need to work out how to get Upper Lower for my Menu…

And how to get the sidebar not to be black…

Karen

NOOOO. Not 2017, 2014

I’m just beginning to understand how these theme things work. I didn’t realize that if the sidebar looks black in the picture for the theme… then… LOL… it will look black when you use the theme.

I am so DENSE

Something called Gently is really close to what I want, and it uses nearly everything in Montezuma, in terms of what appeared on my pages. Not the two color thing, but other than that.

The problems are

1. the menu font is too small and I can’t work out how to get to those pages where we changed things in Montezuma

2. the background color is easy to change, but I can’t work out how to change the sidebar color…

3. where do you go to see if it’s been updated? On the last three themes I tried I could not figure how how to see if they had been recently updated…

??

Karen

You would go to the theme’s home page, and at the top of the right sidebar will be the information on when it was last updated. For Gently, it was last updated March 2016, so almost two years since the last update. What’s worrisome, though, is that if you click on the link that reads Theme homepage →, it takes you to a page that isn’t there. Plus, if you look at the support forum, there were two questions asked over a year ago that were never answered.

For Montezuma, all of the CSS changes were made by going to Appearance → Montezuma Options → CSS Files, and most of your customization was probably done in the various.css file, although you may have gone into the other CSS files for certain settings. For example, I see this rule for your menu items:

#menu1 a, 
#menu1-smooth a { 
   font-family: 'Yanone Kaffeesatz', sans-serif;
   font-size: 	18px; 
   font-weight: 400;
   color: 	#000; 
   padding: 	2px 5px 10px 5px; 
   line-height: 20px;
}

So once you settle on a theme, you can add rules to WordPress’ Custom CSS option to tweak the appearance (Appearance → Customize → Additional CSS). Things like color and font sizes should be easy to adjust with custom CSS, the main thing is picking a layout that you like.

https://grow-your-vitamins.com/

Something called Mitera is also good. Meaning it incorporates everything from Montezuma except the bi-colored bits. But in many of these quite good themes my header image displays really dark, even if I use GIMP to make the image much lighter…

My images on my pages all look the correct colors, so I’m unclear why the header would be so dark.

I’ve been working on this for nearly 12 hours… I’ll put the link to my site with Mitera… above

The Mitera support is really good. They helped me correct my image. Of all the themes I tried, which was less than a dozen, it incorporated most of Montezuma…