How do a create site like sample?

Hey there @backyarder1 – while Twenty Fourteen had a good run, it’s a now decade old, and I have to admit it looks and feels quite dated. For example, its typography is small, and it’s got a fully left-aligned layout, both of which can look quite odd, not to mention hard to read, on larger screens. It’s also got quite a quirky setup, as you’ve found. While I’d be glad to help you get going with it, I’d also like to encourage you to consider a newer theme that is more flexible, modern, meets current standards, is simpler to set up, and will serve you well for several years to come. ??

If you still really want to use Twenty Fourteen, there is a basic setup guide here: https://wordpress.com/theme/twentyfourteen

If you have specific questions along the way, let me know and I’d be glad to help.

Thanks. I’m so annoyed that I lost all of my beautiful blogs. I’m still not entirely sure why the hosting site won’t let me use the same themes I used before but its been years since I created a site with wordpress and I’m floundering. At this point, I’m not sure its worth the trouble. They at least were able to get me to the point where I can download all of my posts but I’m still trying to decide what I want to do moving forward.

I used 2014 as my standard for a long time. Nice theme. It’s dangerous running an unsupported theme. I eventually switched my 20+ sites running 2014 over to Iconic Pro from Themonic a couple of years ago. Never looked back. Super light, supported and can do almost anything. My main site is https://kioskindustry.org

And actually this is my last post regarding 2014. I was up here to “unsubscribe” (to lighten my inbox). For reference 2019 is pretty good and it still primarily uses the classic editor which I am too lazy to switch from myself.

thanks. I think that was my problem. I was using an unsupported theme. (Virtue) Some hackers got in there and messed with a bunch of files. Honestly, from what I saw, it seemed like they got onto the server site rather than the wordpress site but I don’t have enough knowledge about the whole thing. All I know is I lost a lot of work and since it was just a personal blog, I’m not sure its worth the effort to make it again. I just wanted to share some of my articles and photos.

What I would do is check on what backups the hosting service still has access to. Pick one prior to the hackers getting in and dump all your entries and copy down your graphics. Those can be imported though the graphics will be a bit of a pain.

You might want to consider buying some tech time (3 hours?) and pay them to do restore it.

Wordfence is a great plugin for hackers and Cloudflare does pretty good as well.

Make sure your server has all the latest updates installed.

It’s not the cheapest but a host like WPengine automatically secures your server (check it anyway periodically) and they have techs you can talk to (and hire on temporary basis). Let them do the heavy lifting with the sites.

I think the guy who has been helping me there is pretty sick of helping me. LOL. At first I couldn’t login to the wordpress site so I couldn’t download it. But he has been doing it all for free, as far as I know. He hasn’t mentioned any charge for doing it. Anyway, I don’t think we really knew how far back the hackers had been getting in. One day someone emailed me and said that I had a post on my site that they should have been quoted in. The post was about something sexual. hahah. I knew I didn’t have any posts like that on my site and no posts like that DID show up on my site . But somehow they were using my domain to redirect people to articles on other sites. They had edited the index.php files and created new subdirectories that also had editted index.php files. It was a real mess. I might check some of the other hosting sites before I continue working on this one.

You can see “what it was” at web.archive.org.. You can scrape the text for the entries/post with your mouse. Copy into a pure text editor to sanitize it. Do not use Word or email. You need to do a fresh wordpress install on a new server. GoDaddy has supercheap hosting. I used to use Mediatemple.net and then they got bought by GoDaddy.

Pretty laborious to recreate the site as it was. Maybe best to point at it there at Wayback machine.

Wow. Thank you so much for showing me web.archive.org. Although its kind of depressing to see how much work I had put into that layout and how difficult it would be to recreate. It sure seems like if they can have that much of the site on THEIR site that there would be a way for me to get it from them. If you want to see the layout the domain name was freelancephilanthropist.com. I loved the theme and wish I could find another one like it.

@backyarder1 Aw I’m sorry to hear your site got hacked. Based on what you’re saying, it sounds like your theme had a security vulnerability, and that’s why your host isn’t letting you use it again. That said, if the theme author has patched the vulnerability, there shouldn’t be an issue with using it again, but that would be something you’d need to discuss with your host.

If you’re interested in diving into the world of the WordPress Site Editor, you might like to give Twenty Twenty-Three a try. Site Editing is a new way of building WordPress sites, which gives you a lot more flexibility to create layouts than what was possible in “classic” WordPress themes. There are some resources here to get you going, and you could ask any questions in the theme’s forum.

If you do decide to move ahead with Twenty Fourteen, please let me know if you still need any help!

@backyarder1,

This part:

got hacked

and this one:

they don’t want me to use the same theme because they think

Sounds really weird. They want to limit your possibilities and options because they think ?something?. Where are the facts to support their theory?

@zoonini I didn’t really look into 2023 because there were some reviews that said it still had glitches to be worked out. The theme I had before was pretty elaborate but I mostly just want to post photos and blog posts.

@backyarder1 Sure, I hear ya! Site Editing is still in development and it also has a bit of a learning curve.

If you’re looking for a solid and simple classic theme, my personal favourite is Twenty Twenty. I use it for my own personal site, and so does the co-founder of WordPress itself. ??

@zoonini?This is what the site that I lost looked like. I’m not sure if any of the basic wordpress themes can do something like this. https://web.archive.org/web/20211026110146/https://www.freelancephilanthropist.com/