theme twenty-eleven – issues? Common?

  • I’ve now found two severe issues with theme twenty-eleven.

    As it’s free software, I guess I can’t really complain. But a little community support would be helpful.

    First I learned that twenty-eleven evokes the “featured image” function in an entirely different way.

    Today I’ve learned that twenty-eleven child theme has a style.css file that appears to be ignored – well, for the simple font style changes I tried today.

    I’ve posted questions in the twenty-eleven forum – but before considering other themes I might be able to adapt, I thought it might be useful to first ask if such odd behaviors are at all common. There’s no point in jumping from the frying pan into the fire, so to speak.

    Are such odd theme behaviors common? If so – is there a reference that could help avoiding ones that are problematic?

    Many thanks for any advice or suggestions!

    • This topic was modified 4 years, 9 months ago by Jan Dembowski. Reason: Moved to Fixing WordPress, this is not an Developing with WordPress topic
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  • Your two issues aren’t severe. They are more like a misunderstanding of themes and no real documentation. In that sense, that is very common. But themes shouldn’t really need much documentation. Activate the theme, your site looks like the screenshot. Easy.
    But some themes have a lot of options you can configure, so your site doesn’t look like the screenshot. And other themes have something you want, but you need to change other things, and there’s no good way to document how to go about changing what wasn’t coded.

    I don’t think these are odd behaviors. There are literally thousands of themes to choose from, so no one knows them all. You have to try a few to see what’s what.
    There is a theme developer Handbook you can read when you get stuck on something.
    There is also a Code Reference where you can look up each WP function.

    Thread Starter jgstroup

    (@jgstroup)

    Joy –

    I’m afraid we’ll have to agree to disagree on your points of “misunderstanding.”

    Themes have lots of options – and they don’t all have the same options. The fact that some operate the options differently can be a big deal.

    If someone was investing time using a theme expecting to use the “featured image” feature to create a hero image above each post – and after investing lots of time on making the other parts look OK finally discovers that the theme handles the “featured image” feature in a way that a hero image isn’t supported – a huge amount of time can be wasted.

    Without proper theme documentation, anyone with a serious project would need to spend considerable time trying all the features and options of a theme before beginning work. Failing this – much time can be wasted and frustration incurred.

    It’s OK if this is a necessary step due to the lack of theme documentation – but new WordPress users would benefit from a note of caution along this line in the textbooks and tutorials that abound. Maybe this exists and I missed it.

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