Removing the legacy skin in 3.5.5 breaks site layout

Dear Neve developers,

I really enjoyed your theme,
which I have been using for several years, since its first appearance. (at the time I preferred to develop responsive themes by myself). There are many reasons for appreciation:
first of all the relative simplicity of configuration which made it usable with good results even by non-expert users, and then the completeness and integration with other equally useful web tools. After all, WordPress was also born with this spirit, allowing people to make their own contribution of content and ideas through the web, with efficiency, practicality, quality and freedom, even without being technical developers!
It has happened other times that the update of your theme has led, BLINDLY, to some problems in the sites of those who had chosen it, but these were issues that at most could concern the intervention on some configuration, on some style and container, nothing unsolvable except sometimes with a good dose of patience. This time, forgive me for telling you, in my opinion you have really gone beyond a reasonable threshold of acceptability, forgetting the first essential rule for any “update”: backwards compatibility. This too is technical baggage! Of course, it is often a very difficult requirement to maintain, especially if the application is evolving a lot. However, in the impossibility of maintaining it, it is good to call things by their name: define it as a new product, in this case a new theme. In this case, also including the possibility that the previous theme can no longer be supported in the updates.
In all of this the user MUST always be warned. WordPress is not a place where everyone can do what he believes; respect for the users of this CMS is due! To all intents and purposes, they trust those who provide them with tools based on the authority and prestige of the platform. It is not because a plugin or theme is free that there are no responsibilities, at least moral, both in providing it and equally in using it.
It is understandable that some of these tools are premium, or in any case with recognition consideration, we know well how much work and how much study there is behind an application. However, it should not be forgotten that the spirit of the platform is based on mutual liberal collaboration, and that it is made what it is thanks to the support and free work of many generous and responsible people.
For the same reasons it is understandable, legitimate and predictable that a project at a certain point can or should be abandoned, modified, withdrawn. Just as freely, the user community will be able to weigh the authoritativeness and reliability of the developer or software house from this. I repeat this time in my personal opinion you have gone further, and not even the rollback procedure appears to be decisive, the sites remain damaged without remedy. I’m afraid you’ve gone deep into tables and fields. I will take the time to analyze the reasons for the invasiveness of your “update” of which I am sure you have not fully considered the destructive potential on the sites of those who had chosen your theme, otherwise you would have posted at least one warning to protect your reputation.
I have several sites that use basic Neve and I have recommended it to many users (now I am advising them one by one, because some are contacting me in desperation!). Luckily, my personal site management protocol calls for two local host cycles before going into production, and I only screwed up those of just one site.
A theme that from highly appreciated is starting to become inadvisable par excellence. So thanks for the past, even if it turned out to be a time bomb, something else must be said for the present. For the future we will see.

Best regards.

Hi @mahonyson, @gcextempora!

We’re sorry to hear about the difficulties encountered!

Could you please try to migrate separately to the new skin of the theme, as explained here, and then update the theme to the latest version, instead of directly making the theme update, and check if it helps?

Thanks!

Hi?@mahonyson,?@gcextempora!

We had the same problem. I think this is caused that Neve doesn’t suppport bootstrap anymore. Is that correct @luciamarinescu?

So we installed All Bootstrap Blocks and that fixed our problem.

Hi @luciamarinescu,

thank you for your answer. The problem is that we developed some sites with Neve 2.5 child themes and continued with the Legacy skin and the old Header Builder because changing to the new skin broke the layout. Especially the possibility to change columns width manually instead of the automatic width of the new builder made us stay with the old one.

Thanks @mindwarpnl for your idea. Does it mean that you used the Legacy skin before updating to Neve 3.5.5? And could you be so kind to give some more details about the installing All Bootstrap Blocks please.

Thanks

Hi @mahonyson,

Yes we used the legacy skin before updating. We updated to the latest version of Neve 3.5.5. and then some custom pages broke . After we installed the plugin All Bootstrap Blocks the custom pages worked and nedeed just some tiny custom css updates.

I think you can also use any other Bootstrap plugin. Just go to Intall new plugin and search for bootstrap and try.

I understand this is not the best solution, but it did what we wanted.

Good luck !

Thank you very much @mindwarpnl for your fast clarification!

I didn’t realized that “All Bootstrap Blocks” it’s just a plugin. I’ll give it a try.

Very kind.

Hi @luciamarinescu,

Thanks for your reply.
I confirm my appreciation for your theme which has so much good, very good, otherwise I wouldn’t be here to spend time. However, I confirm that the recent update has produced serious problems (in a different way) in sites that used it.
(Obviously always keeping it updated, and usually used in conjunction with Elementor for customizing some layouts: few essential things, to allow the user to be autonomous in the management of his wordpress site with a friendlier interface than gutenberg (powerful but not so successful in this aspect.)

If it can be useful to someone, I share my experience and feedback here.
1. Luckily backups exist, for wise users!
The rollback procedure (it would be great!), if possible, increases the damage, so in my experience I don’t recommend it as a solution: if you see serious problems, it’s better to restore from an updated backup or try to redefine the layout where it is ruined.
2. In some cases it may be enough to simply add a style class to tighten the maximum size of containers in “contained view”, which doesn’t seem to respond anymore. In this way it is perhaps possible to recover the main structure of the previous layouts.
3. This was especially necessary on customized single pages, instead viewed blogs and posts, original to the theme, often required minimal intervention (title).
4. I did differential experiments, which cost me a lot of time: whatever choice you make, the new style panel (in the customize menu) keeps flashing (for no reason?). I point out that in Italian you see the option “lagacy color variant” is not “Legacy Skin”: perhaps it indicates a problem or it simply depends on the translation, but the two concepts are different. While on newer implementations of Neve (series 3) “style” doesn’t appear at all (probably because there is no old skin to recover).
5. I see that the developers have been very concerned that version 3.5.5 could interfere with headers and footers, where many innovations are concentrated. Certainly complex headers and footers require some work, but the new organization improves usability does not limit it and it does not seem devastating at all. It’s understandable that you’ll have to do some tweaking to your site from time to time, and it will be easy to get layouts that match your preferred scheme. It’s an improvement, not a change. I point out minor problems here: some menu qualifiers, second-level items, no longer implement the transition graphic effects on hover (::after), but perhaps the limitation is intentional..
6. Instead, more reconstruction work may require the pages and layouts developed ad hoc starting from the good old original Neve. Of course we are talking about sites that use the child-theme, and custom css to specify the graphic identity, using the solid(!) structure of the theme as an evolved starting point.
7. In these cases, after restoring from a backup, I am dramatically evaluating starting from scratch with a new theme (Neve or other) as a faster and safer solution. Or don’t update Neve beyond 3.5.4 at all, which I don’t think will be a long-term solution though. This is why I wrote that, free to update your theme (thanks for your continuous development!), a clear indication of the pitfalls that could be linked to this 3.5.5, would have given the opportunity to reflect, experiment and decide without anxieties and disasters to recover, and saved so much time for those who trusted you. Having said that, in my opinion the new version of Neve brings appreciable improvements, generously even in the free version. The theme is beautiful, even more powerful and usable, but the doubt remains: if I take a deep breath and patiently rebuild everything… when will a new sudden(!) disaster?

regards

Hi @mahonyson, @gcextempora and @mindwarpnl!

Unfortunately, no other users reported such issues after the update, so there may be some edge cases that we can’t replicate and that are very difficult to debug, since we can’t reproduce the behaviour on our test instances. If you could provide us the URLs to your sites, we could take a closer look at the issue and try to suggest a solution.

Thank you!

Hi @luciamarinescu,

I will provide the URLs of two sites and their copies. Both are using Neve child themes.
The first original site uses Neve version 3.5.3 (https://capeye.fr) and the copy Neve version 3.5.6 (https://capeye.d-marheine.com).

The second site has Neve version 3.5.1 installed (https://d-marheine.com/portail/) and his copy Neve 3.5.6 (https://d-marheine.com/test/).

Both original sites are using the old Header Builder and the Legacy skin. As mentioned before switching to the new Header Builder broke the layout due to the automatic width of components even when sticking with the Legacy skin.

Would it be possible to reactivate the Legacy skin?

Thank you!

Hi @mahonyson,

Thanks for providing the links!

For the first site, I can see that the header color on scroll is different than what it should be. That can be changed by adding the code below in the Additional CSS section within the Customizer.

nav.header--row.header-main.hide-on-mobile.hide-on-tablet.layout-full-contained.nv-navbar.myfixed {
background-color: #648d1c !important;
}

For the second one, the code below should fix the layout of the header items.

.builder-item.has-nav {
padding: 0 0 !important;
}
.nav-menu-primary .menu-item {
padding-left: 0 !important;
}
.menu-item-686 {
min-width: auto !important;
}

Unfortunately, it’s not possible to reactivate the Legacy Skin, but you could try to follow the steps provided here to add the CSS stylesheet from the legacy skin back to your site. It does not restore the actual legacy skin, but just the main style. However, in some cases, this may create CSS conflicts with the new style of the theme.

I hope this helps!

Hi @luciamarinescu,

thank you very much for your response!

The plugin helped quite well for the first site (just some CSS rules to add and some justifications in the customizer) but for the second there is still a lot of work to do. Nevertheless it is much easier now.

By the way, isn’t the theme skin switcher (Style tab) in the customizer obsolete now? There is still the Legacy skin available even it is removed from the theme (version 3.5.7).

Thanks again for your help!

Hi @mahonyson,

Do you still see the Style panel(https://vertis.d.pr/i/w19xFt) in the Customizer with the latest version of the theme, 3.5.7?

Regards,
Stefan

Hi @stefancotitosu,

yes, the Style Panel is still there in all of my sites using Neve 3.5.7.

See the screenshot showing that the Legacy Skin (Coloris hérité) is still a choice : https://imgur.com/a/d86aEqX

Best regards

Hi @mahonyson!

We can’t replicate this behaviour on every test instance, but the Style panel appears indeed in some edge cases. We reported this to our developers and it will be fixed in a future update of the theme.

Thank you!