Best advice for migrating to responsive theme?

  • I have only been developing with WP for a few months, and so have lots to learn; but I’ve been programming for years and look forward to digging into its code.
    However, I have a client who is eager to update their (heavily) customized theme to a responsive one with a more modern look. After looking at their current codebase, I concluded I should just switch to a new theme, and work with the content until it looks better.

    So I did this, and installed a responsive theme (on a development server, of course) and activated it — and now of the site looks way broken. It is going to take a major effort to cut and paste the content to get it looking good again….<sigh>

    Does anyone have any time tested approaches for better ways of going about this? Would it be better to start with an empty theme, and add content from the old site to it? Or stick with this new theme I’ve activated, and work with it?

    Lots of choices…but what’s best?

    Thanks,
    Rick

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  • Hey Rick,

    I think you’ll get a different opinion from everyone on this. Do you have multiple monitors by any chance?

    I would likely have the old site opened on one screen and the new responsive blank theme on the other. This way you can just work on a page to page basis and copy and paste across. This could work nicely if the new theme has some kind of dummy content import and you can just override the preset areas with what you think is best.

    The only other thing I could think you could do is export/import the data with a plugin which supports meta fields but that would require a relationship between old and new likely.

    Each theme is gonna work differently, so I’d just stick to one and work through the manual slog.

    Many thanks

    • This reply was modified 7 years, 9 months ago by Adam Morgan.
    Thread Starter rcx

    (@rcx)

    Adam,

    Thanks much for the response. That’s about what I expected, but glad to get some confirmation, and the suggestion of the page by page construction.

    Interesting to confirm as well, as I suspected, there is no “automatic” translation from one theme to another, unless there is some prepared meta data.

    thanks again,
    Rick

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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