GaryMak

Thanks so much for taking the time (multiple times) to explain things. I think I have a better grasp on things now. Certainly what the issue is. It does seem much more complicated than years ago, and since it’s not my area of expertise, nor do I devote much time to it to stay abreast of developments, may have fallen behind. I guess that’s why there are sites like Wix (which I also have a website on for a volunteer organization I run) that make it easy to get up and running and keep up to date. Anyway, thanks again!

Thank you so much. That was very helpful info/advice. I spent several hours last night (while hoping for your response (thanks again!)) picking out a couple of new free WordPress themes and running them in Preview mode to see how they look. I’ve narrowed down to 2 possibilities. I’ll probably look for another couple of more themes today. You provided an important piece of info for me, that it’s GoDaddy’s job to update the PHP and once done, I or “we” (GoDaddy and me) can check out whether the themes I’m thinking of are compatible…

At this point, there is no reason to try to salvage the theme I am currently using. I’m just going to start anew and do a major facelift with a new theme that is all copacetic with the latest versions of whatever stuff its supposed to be compatible with… Hopefully, things will hum along smoothly for years after this upgrade, just clicking the buttons for “update PHP” or “update whatever”.

Now, once I have things up and running, if I run into trouble, I have another option with the https://jobs.wordpress.net/ option you gave, but hopefully that won’t be necessary. But great to know!

Finally, for future reference, could you explain what this forum is for, then? WordPress is just a host platform for themes, as I understand it (and that may not be correct.) If I’m having trouble with one of the themes that I found on the WordPress website, can I not ask questions about that here? Or do I need to email the creator of the theme directly then and not ask here. I’m a bit confused…

Anyway, you’ve been a real help and I appreciate it very much. I’ll let you know how it goes…

Wow!!! Ugh! Thanks so much for responding and explaining! This is all way beyond me. I built the site on GoDaddy using WordPress since that was what they had and picked this theme from one of many available. I have basic skills, not advanced. (I run two other websites (more recent) that are simpler but way easier to adjust it seems.) I’ve updated this site over the years periodically until I reached this point. This is just a website I built to highlight work for my small business. I thought that this WordPress Forum was where I would ask those questions… I see your point, that the problem is related to my Theme (not WordPress) which is extinct…

Well, “Plan A” as you outlined above is out. Not investing any kind of money or extensive time to repair this. The “theme” isn’t that important. So, “Plan B” it is then.

A question then – and forgive me if it’s not “appropriate for this forum” (I honestly have no idea) is: is the problem of upgrading to PHP version-newest-whatever a function of WordPress or my (current) theme? It would seem from your response if I understand it correctly (which I might not) that it is related to using an obsolete “Theme”, so if I convert it to a modern, up-to-date theme, all should be well…? Yes?

Another question, do you recommend the free Themes over the “commercial” ones as you called it? (I’m assuming you are referring to paid themes as “commercial” themes…

I don’t mind having to redo all the galleries actually. Yes, a lot of work, but the reason I got into this mess was I decided the site needed a major content facelift… I guess sometimes facelifts aren’t successful… ??

Thanks so much for your response!!!!!!!! It was VERY helpful!

UPDATE: I found the cause of the problem above but don’t know the solution. In further updating some images, I accidentally deleted the gallery associated with “MOSTLY BIRDS” (https://www.garymak.photography/#lightbox%5Bgroup%5D/0/) No problem. I created another gallery and uploaded images to it. The images appear in the Lightbox no problem. Now, however, if you click on any of the photos, I get the error message ““Image cannot be loaded. Make sure the path is correct and image exist.”? Soooo, the problem is with the creation of new galleries. They seem to lose their connection to a single enlargement – but not the connection to all appear in the gallery…

Hope this helps narrow it down!

Yes, thanks, again. I went there. (I have an account, too.) And it says that they no longer support “Photolux”… there aren’t any forums that discuss it either that I’ve found. So mow I’ve got a template that the “footer” controls were eliminated somehow (I mean I put it there originally through some control) and it seems that it’s just going to stay that way unless I change platforms, which is a pain, but I certainly won’t be using Envato/Pexeto or whatever it’s called again. Too difficult to get info and no support… Anyway, thank YOU for responding with good suggestions. I appreciate it.

Thanks for you suggestion. Pexeto doesn’t offer support and the documentation it gives section references “footer” (where I thought it ought to be) but there is no place that hold the text in question… There is no footer.php section that holds this info..

-Gary

That looks great! It looks like it will really help get the site up and running. I read through the first 3 pages and was impressed. I think it addresses some of the fundamentals that I now know but didn’t when I first tried Minimatica. Go for it then! It should get you up and running and with some “figure-it-outness” you can probably do a lot of tweaking on your own.

A few general tips:
1) Create a folder in whatever folder you are using an call it “Minimatica Settings (Page) 140526” (or whatever date convention you use) where “Page” is the settings page you copied. (There are lots.) After you get it basically working, take screen shots of the settings as a baseline. Then, create a new folder each day (or as appropriate for your filing system) and take a screen shot each time you make progress. It gets very confusing and hard to remember what you changed and where it is. This will be helpful.

2) Try to understand the difference between “media” (the basic folder containing your images) and “gallery” and “porfolio” and “pages.” If you can master that, then you will be rolling!

3) Askimet is plugin that will suck the spam right off your sight. It’s free and does a great job. I recommend it. I didn’t install it at first and after just 3 days, i couldn’t believe the spam comments I was getting. “Nice site. I really liked it. Good job. Amazing wrinkle cream for sales blah blah blah…” I installed it and now I don’t get any of that.

Let me know some time when your site is up and running and “ready for prime time” as it were.

Good luck!

WordPress is the easiest of the “user managed” template formats, “easiest” being the operative word…

Here’s an idea: You might check out Squarespace. (https://www.squarespace.com) 30 day no-credit card trial. Photography-centered web-hosting. The photographer and author Ibarionex Perello* (https://ibarionex.net/thecandidframe/) uses them to host his website and recommends them (they support his website, and yes, that’s his given name!) I tried it for a month and almost went back to it. You really can be up and running in 30 minutes or so. (OK, if you’re a total newbie, 1 hour..)

Good luck, ’66!

*He has great podcasts. I listen to them a lot.

Here are some thoughts, Sweet66, for what they’re worth…

I, too, never figured out how to get Minimatica to work (at all) and tried several other templates, such as “Autofocus”, “Picturesque”, “Origami”, “News Channel” but none of them came close to the image layout that I wanted (like “Minimatica’s”) nor could I figure out how to tweak them to get them closer to the functionality I wanted. That seems to be a common theme (no pun intended) with a lot of the layouts in photography, which are a lot trickier and temperamental than simple blogs with a few photos. (Even those blogs with photos can be tricky, though, as I learned with my blog https://www.internationalperspective.org) Handling photos is tough and tricky in any post, more so with photography-centric templates. (And then you have to get a theme that will handle each of the main browsers well, as well as mobile: iPhone, iPad, Android… They’re all a bit different.)

It’s also frustrating because the photography templates rely on subtle differences between “media”, “portfolio”, “gallery”, “post” – and sometimes that’s so subtle it’s confusing. Sometimes the way you set up one affects the other down the line…

So I was pretty frustrated, too. I realized that since I needed a lot of support, it was difficult to do this with free themes. So I looked at paid photography themes.

Then I discovered “Photolux.” This was a paid download but I really liked the layout even more than “Minimatica” and it seemed to offer a lot of variations. So I bought it.

Then, more frustration! At first I couldn’t get it to work very well or to look like the demo version at all. But – and here’s the important thing – the author walked me through each and every problem I had. I was very specific. “How do I do this?” or “Why doesn’t this show here” and he provided good details. There is a 24 hour turnaround time from when you post to when you get an answer; fair enough. But he was very prompt in answering, showing and explaining, (and very patient) and several times, writing CSS snippets and telling me where to insert them. Gradually, over a couple of weeks, things started to resemble what I originally had in my mind’s eye.

Also, though the process I learned a lot about WordPress and a couple of times was able to figure out the solution I had asked before I got the response. It’s a learning process…

Right now, I’m pretty satisfied with the look, feel and function of the site. You can check it out at: https://www.garymak.photography

I’m not saying don’t use “Minimatica.” I am saying that if there’s a paid version, you may get more functions and features and quicker response from the author than with the free version. (I’m not sure if there’s a paid version of “Minimatica”, I can’t remember.) Certainly I can only speak from my experience with the paid theme i used and attest to the author’s responsiveness, patience (!) and effectiveness as helping me understand better and resolve me issues.

Be confident that you will become more competent as you plunge into it, you will gain more confidence, and the more you work with it, with the right consistent and prompt help, you’ll eventually get to your solution, and it’ll start to make some sense.

I hope this was helpful. Again, one man’s experience.

Good luck to you!

THANKS!!!!!!!! i will try that next time and get back to you. It will probably be two weeks before the next post, but I will save this and try it. Thank you very much! Here’s hopin’…..

Thanks for noticing my question / plea/ cry! ??

BTW, I am using WeaverII Convention

Actually, I don’t think the problem is related to any version incompatibility. It’s been a problem from the beginning.

Last night I “fixed” (not really) the problem for the post by starting the post with a longer word. Originally, the post began with “I”. Because there was a narrow space (call it an “invisible column”) between the right of the photo (set as the “featured image”) and the end of the page margin, the letter “I” fit in and so the post started with the letter “I” way up at the top next to the photo, and because the next word in the sentence was a little longer and would not fit in this narrow invisible “column,” the rest of the post began (as the whole thing should have) directly below the photo. So the post began with “I” at the extreme upper right, and then long white margin all the way down to the end of the photo, and then the paragraph continued from the lfet under the photo. Bad! (Hope you follow me so far.)

Now, if you make the photo smaller, you increase the width of this invisible column on the right so that more short words fit. In that case, you can have the blog post appearing as a very narrow column, almost like a “chimney” to the right of the photo, for the entire length of the photo, until is “spills” over and continues under the photo as a normal paragraph. That’s very weird, but better than the alternatives.

Now if you make the photo too big – “too big” is defined as >176,200 total pixels and/or greater than 940 pixels wide, then the photo (the featured image) will replace the blog header image! Don’t want to do that.

So, we begin a dance to get a photo that is precisely 938 pixels wide but less than 176,200 total pixels, which starts to get very time consuming (even though i know how to do this very easily) because even if you do this, it still doesn’t necessarily work! The resolution of the photo (100dpi, 200dpi, 400 dpi etc) doesn’t seem to affect the process, as I’ve tried various resolutions with the same pixel formulations and it doesn’t seem to matter.

That means every photo published is handled uniquely by WeaverII and it’s strictly a guess as to weather it will work or not. There is no documentation on this, and as I said earlier, the WeaverII forum is dead.

Clearly, the solution is some kind of coding as in HTML coding, a simple “P” new paragraph symbol you can insert to the right of the photo, or some other coding that you can have a simple checkbox “Keep Image On It’s Own Line” or some such option.

In the meantime, I just have to start each post with at least a 3 letter word. No “A” or “I” or any of many two letter words… This is a “solution” but it’s like hunting rabbits with hand grenades. It may work, but it’s not really how you are supposed to do it…

Hi, is Weaver II still alive? The forum is offline/inactive and there doesn’t seem to be much info available…

Thanks!

Hmmm, now I have the sliders working!!!! thanks!!!!!! But the pictures in the sliders are enormous! Only a small fraction of the photo shows. Is there a way to get a smaller image in the slider frame? Thanks!

Thanks so much your your comment!!!! Let me try it. And thanks for your offer… I’ll see how much progress I make… and post here.

YES! I have the exact same problem! The image of Minimatica in the “Themes Directory” (that gives a summary of it’s function and appearance https://www.ads-software.com/themes/minimatica) clearly shows multiple sliding photos, which I assume you can click on to get to the gallery of photos it represents. I uploaded the theme and have spent hours trying different configurations, settings, etc. Nothing works. There is no information on this anywhere and, as I can see from your post seven months ago, no response or help either. I can appreciate that advanced users, competent in adding all this “short code” and “CSS” code can tweak the template into various custom-configurations. However, if it’s a template, then it should look like what it is advertised as when you download the template, or have clear customizations check-boxes to do so. That’s one reason I chose EXPOUND theme with WEAVERII. It has clear customization adjustments and was easy to figure out and get it to work like it was shown in the “Themes Directory.”

At this point, I think I’ll give up on Minimatica, give it a “1” rating, and go buy a premium template so I can get some information. I may try calling tech support for GoDaddy, since they are featuring this template as a “recommended” template, and maybe I can get some info. If I do, I’ll come back here and post what I find.

Too bad, as Minimatica looks like the image I am searching for… guess I have to keep searching, or go back to school to learn programming.