theme for multi-post blog

First of all, thanks for the hint on the pretty permalinks! I changed that.
I did manage to get the background image to display, but I wasn’t able to use the url like you described. I had to use the full http address – none of the prescribed placeholders: %tpldir%, %tplupldir% or %upldir% worked for the location. Any ideas why that would be?

Not sure. You tried %upldir%/2014/06/header.jpg? The full URL is fine, although if you plan on migrating to another web site, you’ll have to change the value, but no big deal.

Thanks again and sorry for the delay! I’m having a visitor, so I’m a little distracted. I was sure I had tried all permutations, but when I just copied your suggestion it worked! Now I’m struggling with 2 more things:
1. The white bar that covers part of the image in the banner area. How can I get rid of that?
2. How can I get the height to adjust to the size of the image? I’ve tried all sorts of options, but only seem to be able to either have the full width of the image and parts of the height cut off, or have the height squeezed into the provided banner and have the image be tiny and only cover some part of the total width. I guess, in essence I want the banner to adjust to the image, rather than the other way around.

1. The white bar that covers part of the image in the banner area. How can I get rid of that?

That white bar is the navigation menu. Since you don’t have any menu items, it’s empty, but the space for it still appears. Three ways to handle it: you can either make it transparent so the image behind shows through (in case you are thinking about having a menu in the future), you can hide it from view, or you can remove it from the header.php subtemplate.

To make the menu transparent, add this CSS:

#menu1-wrapper {
   background: transparent;
}

To hide it, add this CSS:

#menu1-wrapper {
   display: none;
}

If you remove the section for wp_nav_menu from the header.php sub template, then you can change the class for logo-area from col5 to col12 so that the logo-area (which contains the site title) will stretch across the entire width of the header.

2. How can I get the height to adjust to the size of the image?

You will have to insert an image element into the header instead of setting the background of banner-bg. I created a tutorial here. Let me know when you’re done examining and implementing this, because afterwards I want to move it into the BytesForAll Gold Forum (for users who make a donation to the theme). BytesForAll is the developer of the Montezuma theme.

Great – I used your tutorial – again with great success! Thank you once more. I saw that you used my photo for the test page. Do you intend to use it for your tutorial?
I have one more question, if I may. It seems that the most recent post headline becomes the headline for the blog. I’m not sure, if I like that… If I just remove the DIV that it’s in, would that take are of the problem? Or am I inviting other issues with that approach? I guess I would want to remove the bookmark link that’s being created, but I haven’t been able to figure out, how to do that.
I’ll find the donation button when I’m done with this job ??
Thank you very much for all your help!

I don’t intend to use that image in the tutorial, I just used it so you could see how it would work with your own site.

You should be able to remove this section, which outputs the post/page title, from the template without any problem, but I would leave the rest of the DIV intact, in case you want to add any text later using the page editor:

<h1>
   <a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="<?php the_title_attribute(); ?>" rel="bookmark"><?php the_title(); ?></a>
   <?php bfa_comments_number(); ?>
</h1>

Glad you like the theme. I think the more you work with it, and the more you find out what you can do with it, the more you’ll like it.

Thank you, thank you, thank you! I’ll respond in more detail tomorrow. I had more visitors come and go – my head’s spinning… ??

Here it is now: the blog that all this was meant for: berlin-brooklyn.com. The other one was just a test site I set up to practice on – though for possible later use. As you can see, I changed everything to red (#b00b0b) – including all the icons. I’d be happy to share those files with you, if you’re interested in a red Montezuma version.
I had to ask about the photo – I never got permission from the artist(s), so I couldn’t just let you use it for commercial purposes. I’d be happy to let you use another photo of mine though as a little thank you gift!
Also, I did donate – because: yes, I do like the theme! And because I was so impressed with your generosity of support and advice!
Thank you very, very much!
uliuliuli

Hello again,
I hope you can help me with this big, new problem! The person who I had created the blog for asked me to get rid of the dates or move them to the right. I found the code for it, commented it out and it worked. But when I looked into the css to see if I could float them to the right, I couldn’t save my changes. The error message I got was that the database seemed to have no capacity or was otherwise not reachable at the moment. When it finally was and I hit save, I checked the page: every change I had ever made had disappeared! No more 2 columns, the dates are back, etc. etc. All the changes I had made to the virtual structure were gone. The only thing that’s left are the color changes I had made directly into the existing (not various.css) css files.
So I went ahead and implemented all the changes again, thinking I must have hit a reset button somewhere by accident. A few days later, the same thing happened all over again!
I called the host company, but they couldn’t help with the database issue.
The only other thing I should add is that the database already housed a wordpress blog. I made sure there was no confusion by adding BB to the prefix. Do you think that could be the problem? I could create a new database, but before I put in hours and hours of work again, just to find out that nothing “sticks”, I wanted to see if you had some insight.
The testblog I did, BTW, does not show the same problem, and the only difference between the two is that the test blog does not share a database.
I really hope you can help once again with this vexing problem!
Thanks in advance – I truly appreciate all the help you have given so far!
uliuliuli

Unfortunately I don’t know what the problem might be that would reset your Montezuma options. You can save yourself a lot of aggravation, however, by saving your Montezuma settings to an external file so if something goes wrong, you can restore the settings very easily.

Go to Appearance > Montezuma Options > Export Import > Export Settings. You can copy the contents of the Current Montezuma Settings field to a text editor and save it, and if you need to restore those settings, just paste them into the Import Settings field.

Since your test site is very similar to your production site, what you can try doing to save yourself some time is copying the Montezuma settings from the test site into your Production site, and then make any specific changes like file names.

Thank you very much as always! Your quick and detailed response is very much appreciated!

I did download the settings as you described, so I won’t I have to redo the site yet again. Good to know this option exists – I will keep it in mind for future sites. However, I’m worried that the incompatibility with the database could also affect the blog entries in the long run. Curiously, I have not been able to recreate the problem to take down the exact wording of the error message.

Thanks – all the best,
uliuliuli