Theme previews are generic blog content only

  • adrienm

    (@adrienm)


    6 years ago

    Ever since I started with WordPress several years ago, ALL theme previews (when searching themes to install) *only* show generic blog home pages and content. I’ve never previewed a single theme that grabs any of my existing content. Even more importantly, I’ve never been able to preview any of the e-commerce pages, with or without my existing content. I can’t even navigate to them within the preview. I can’t imagine I’m the only one with this problem, but web searches and forum searches here turned up zilch. I did see a topic here that addressed a preview not matching a demo thumbnail exactly due to not having that demo’s content uploaded, but it shouldn’t show just generic blog pages and posts, especially if the theme is an e-commerce them. Am I missing something? Is something wrong with my install? Do I *really* have to install a them first to preview it properly? If so, what’s the point of the preview function if it isn’t really a preview of what the theme will make my site look like? I’m stumped. Thanks in advance!

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Joy

    (@joyously)

    Yes, you are missing something.
    There are two places to preview themes. One is the www.remarpro.com site and the other is in the Customizer of your site.
    If you go to Appearance > Themes > Add New in your admin panel, you will see the lists of themes in www.remarpro.com. Clicking on a theme will show the www.remarpro.com preview, which has some generic data (unchanging) that the theme can display. All themes display this same data, so it doesn’t do anything fancy like ecommerce.

    If you go into the Customizer, and click on Change Theme, you are given the choice to look at the themes that are installed on your site and the themes on www.remarpro.com. The preview will use your site’s data and plugins. The preview does have to install the theme locally in order to work, but you can see how it would look without affecting the front end of your site.

    There has been work done to improve the generic data on www.remarpro.com. There are other bigger things going on, so it hasn’t gotten deployed yet. Also, there is an issue with how the site keeps track of which theme is being previewed, and it doesn’t work if your browser is set to ignore third party cookies. This is known, and should be fixed eventually.

    When I got to www.remarpro.com and click themes and pick a random theme, if I then click preview, none of the photos load in the preview. It’s very frustrating. In the past I was able to “look around” the theme with their content and photos in it to see how how I could eventually make my site look. Now all I can do is look at the thumbnail of the first page.

    The preview on a few will have a header photo but never any other photos. What am I doing wrong?

    Moderator Samuel Wood (Otto)

    (@otto42)

    www.remarpro.com Admin

    The theme previewer uses our content here. If you want to preview it with your own content, then you have to actually install the theme. Then the preview on your own site will have your content instead of ours.

    Our preview only has the one photo. We’re still looking at expanding the content.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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