rickyvernio

Found ONE so far. It’s called Pinnacle.

The theme has “read more” and “leave a comment” options right out of the box, in the right place.

Also, perfect typography options. Any font, any size.

However, the title is a huge problem. I’m trying to hide it, with an eye to having my uploaded background to serve as the title. The title either vanishes altogether, leaving me nothing to upload the background to, or stubbornly displays the site’s name on the BLOG page and, for some mysterious reason, the name of the category (in my case that would be “Uncategorized”) on post pages.

What gives?

I tried to get to their (Pinnacle’s) support forum. They wouldn’t let me in. Only paying customers are allowed. Free version users aren’t worth bothering about, I suppose.

Always happy to help.

Hi, Joy.

I switched to your theme.

The comments are where they belong.

There’s still no “read more” or “continue reading” button anywhere.

I’ve tried these approaches:

1. I included the “More” widget in my post after the second paragraph.

2. I removed the “More” widget and published the post without it.

3. I tried writing the excerpt in the little window myself.

4. I left the little window alone, and the theme published the excerpt with “[…]” at the end.

No effect. No “read more” button anywhere.

Here’s a screenshot of one of my efforts:

No effect.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 9 months ago by rickyvernio.

Thank you for your explanations, and especially for the theme suggestion – I really appreciate it. I’ll try it all out and get back to you with my report!

I don’t know about events, but in blog posts and the blog home page (the one that is supposed to display excerpts), the header seems to be nailed down in every theme I’ve tried. You can tweak it a little here and there, change the background color (in some themes), as well as attach a tiny logo of your own. Apart from that, you’re stuck with what they’re giving you.

On static pages, it’s a different matter altogether. On a static page, you can say good-bye to the theme which only gets in the way anyway, and do what you like, pretty much – with WordPress’s native editor or Elementor. The theme will get in the way here and there, like when you want to play around with fonts or stick a piece of html code in the text section of the text widget, but all in all, on static pages you’re the boss.

The blog page won’t even let me use Elementor.

All this, I suspect, is meant to get you to “upgrade” to paid versions of everything – themes, plugins, and the editor. Whether any paid version is any better than the free version (less buggy, less intrusive) is anybody’s guess. Some are, and some are worse, I would imagine. The free versions are in no way reassuring.

I may be wrong about all of the above – I’m kind of new to this. But that’s my impression so far.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 9 months ago by rickyvernio.

That was irony, not sarcasm.

Thanks, everybody, for your help.

[SOLVED]

The excerpts plugin was screwing everything up.

I deactivated it, pulled the HOME page back into Elementor, updated, and now the page looks okay.

I’ll try to reinstall mailchimp now.

Ah, yes:

Mailchimp: version 4.7.5

Elementor: version 2.9.2

MC4WP, which I downloaded yesterday. The free version.

As for Elementor: the latest free version, probably, downloaded less than a week ago.

NOTHING resolves the issue.

No, deactivating mailchimp does not resolve anything.

The page is still in the same state it was last night. Which is a shame.

Okay, I wanted to record another update, but now the forum won’t let me. “ERROR: You do not have permission to edit that topic.”

How quaint.

Anyway:

Since I can see the HOME page just fine when I pull it into Elementor, I decided to create a bunch of templates (because only the paid version of Elementor creates a template from the ENTIRE page).

I created 18 templates, and they constitute my entire HOME page.

Now I have a good mind to:

1. Create a new page, and call it HOME-TEMP. Pull the templates into it, creating an exact replica of the original HOME page.

2. Delete the old HOME page.

3. Rename the HOME-TEMP page HOME.

Problem is, I’m not altogether clear on what this might do to the links and menus – or to this surprisingly fragile theme.

Any ideas?

• This reply was modified 4 years, 9 months ago by rickyvernio.

Okay.