Basic Mysteries

  • What does it take to make changes?

    I’ve been using WordPress.com for quite a while, with great success and pleasure, thank you. But I’ve now set up multiple standalone (NOT multisite) sites with WordPress. While I can enter content and add plugins and so forth, My attempts at using CSS have been completely foiled. No matter what I change (as root) in style.css is ignored. How hard is it to change h1{} for gosh sakes.

    So clearly I am missing something. Something really simple. Help Please.

    =====
    I’ve learned
    https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Site_Architecture_1.5
    and know that index.php is my friend.

    I’ve learned
    https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Designing_Headers
    and have examined headers.php very closely, as all the h{n} elements in style.css. I’ve edited all of these adjusting

    float: left;
    to
    float: center;

    and trying adding
    text align: center;

    I’ve saved an HTML of a page, so I can examine the HTML for clues on where to do, without success yet.

    I’ve examine the MySQL database and I have lots of tables and entries.

    I’m learning a lot of good stuff, but not finding how to do the most basic tasks.

    These are some of the things that need doing:

    Front Page
    ? Title
    I want it centered, not left-aligned
    ? Image
    I want it centered and resizable, not left aligned and fixed size. Changing the resolution doesn’t seem to change things.

    Forum (BBPress)
    ? Description and image
    I want these to show on the actual Forum page as a header section. It shows in the list of Forums, but disappears when you select the forum

    ==========
    I’m sure there are many more, and I can’t believe that I have to go to CSS to do them, so I conclude that I”m missing something really simple. But after two days of deliberate research and experimentation I haven’t found it.

    Thanks in advance, Andy

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

  • I would suggest you to create a child theme to do a modification. According to https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Child_Themes: “Child themes are the recommended way of modifying an existing theme.”

    I am new to WordPress. I have tried a few modifications to several themes, and never encountered problems. So far, I find Customizr is the most customizable theme.

    To debug a web page, it would be much easier if you use Firebug, or the newly created Firefox Developer Edition. Both of them are free, and good stuff!

    Hi,

    Just be sure that you edit css file in your active theme instead of play with index.php or headers.php or anything else instead of css

    Try first with tool like firebug or just in your browser inspect element and play with css there, that you see results.

    Definitely use a child theme – do not edit the theme files directly as those changes will be lost when the theme is updated. You really don’t want to be in that situation down the road!

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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