markcorder

IT WORKS! I tried calling up one of my oldest posts and making a slight change, and now that post is displaying at the top of the Last Updated widget, and with the correct timestamp.

Thanks for your attention to this, and for your great plugin!

Sorry – I had posted that it seemed fixed, but it was my mistake…
… it’s still showing the latest published. I’m changing this back to “Not Resolved”

• This reply was modified 2 years, 6 months ago by markcorder. Reason: Mistaken
• This reply was modified 2 years, 6 months ago by markcorder.

Thank you much! Love the plugin!

Follow-up: I just noticed that the incorrect date-stamp beside each of the eight entries (which again, are the last eight I created, not modified) is reflecting the exact time the dashboard was last updated in the browser! As I sit there and refresh the DB, all eight of these entries change to whatever the current time is!

Maybe I can help. I’m going from memory here without actually looking at an installation of Sparkling, but when it comes to the menus it all works about the same…

From the Admin area, click on APPEARANCE > MENUS. There can be multiple menus on a site, so choose the one you want to edit. Then you can either edit your HOME link to go to the Page, Post, Category, or even specific URL that you want. Or you can just delete the existing HOME link and make a new one.

This page may help : https://easywpguide.com/wordpress-manual/appearance/updating-the-menu/

Hope this helps. If you need me to, I’ll load up a copy of Sparkling and play along with you…

I’ve used the Sparkling theme several times and it’s a good one – but I can’t remember all of it’s Customizations off the top of my head. Try looking under Appearance > Customize to see what you can change. You can probably turn the Featured Images on or off, but resizing them would be a more extensive trick…

Likewise I doubt it has a built-in “Grid” option, but you can add that with a plugin like one of these:

Post Grid

WP Ultimate Post Grid

LOL! Now I see where the problem was too. Most folks install WP in a subfolder like “wordpress” or something like that, and then the address on your development server would be https://localhost/wordpress/ – and only the WP files would be there.

I use XAMPP as a development server and it uses /htdocs/ instead of /var/www/html/ – but if I just go to https://localhost/ without pointing to a subdirectory I’ll see the XAMPP welcome page.

I’d recommend you put your files in a subfolder too, just to avoid conflicts. Also if you do plan to edit the Sparkling files directly, you should use a “child-theme” to do this. Here’s a article about that :

What is a WordPress Child Theme?

It’s possible to edit a Theme’s PHP files from the WP-Admin area (that’s the page you’re on), but it really isn’t recommended because there is no “undo” option or a way to back things up. So most folks just edit the files directly using their favorite code editor. In that case, you’d edit the files you find in home > wp-content > themes > sparkling as I mentioned above.

But you can do a lot to change the appearance and behavior of a theme by “Customizing” it from the WP-Admin area: Go to Appearance > Themes and make sure Sparkling is selected as your Active Theme – then click on the “Customize” button. All themes are different, but I’ve worked with Sparkling before and it has lots of options that can be configured from this Customize page. Additionally, you’ll find a section here where you can add your own CSS styling that will override the theme’s default CSS.

(Note that from the “Appearance” menu there’s also an “Edit” link that will allow you to directly edit the theme’s PHP files, and this is what I mentioned above that is NOT recommended! But just making changes on the Customize page can be undone by selecting the “default” values that each option has.)

I’m afraid there isn’t a single HTML file that you can edit. Themes are made up from various PHP files which get included (or not) depending on which page you’re viewing. For instance, the “Comments” section of a post or page is usually a separate file (comments.php) that you’ll find in the theme’s directory. But the styling for ALL of these various components comes from a single “style.css” file that is likewise in the theme’s directory.

This page explains Customizing Themes a little better : https://easywpguide.com/wordpress-manual/appearance/selecting-your-theme/previewing-and-customizing-your-theme/

If you need to do something more extensive than the Customizer will allow, let us know specifically what it is you’re trying to do!

The Theme files you want to edit are located in a specific folder of your WP installation. Let’s say you put all the WP files in a directory called “home”, then you’d find the files for the Sparkling theme in home > wp-content > themes > sparkling.

There are multiple files that make a Theme work – you’ll need to know which-does-what. I’ll monitor this thread and help you if I can (as will many others, I’m sure!)

Hope this helps!

I see the new code is in the repos – so I’ll mark this as resolved. ??

LOL – yeah, I had encountered the problem and figured out what was happening by reading Changes that Affect Theme Authors in 4.9.6, and pointed out to the folks at WPBeginner that they were bound to get swamped with questions about it – and maybe they should consider a dedicated article about this. I had already made it work as per the “Changes” article above – and their example does about the same.

Thanks again! ??

Thanks so much – I still think WP-Forge is one of your best themes and I like working with it. (And I’m sure you wouldn’t mind that I’ve actually added that new parameter to the array in comments.php myself – it’s fairly straightforward – but I’ll be glad to have your patch too!)

I have the same problem, but I can nail it down a little better – on my site, SLB only works if I’m logged-in to my WP site. If I log-out and reload the site SLB stops working and clicking on a image only goes to the image URL.

I’m the only one who ever logs into my site – so that makes me the only one who sees SLB working!

Any idea why this would happen?

My site is https://markcorder.com

Clearing the cache worked for me – I use WP Super Chache.

I’m feeling a little senior myself… After trying various tricks that were OK except on really small screens – I found the answer staring back at me from the Foundation docs. Try using their “Block Grid” class if you need YARPP thumbnails that behave nicely at palm size.

https://foundation.zurb.com/docs/components/block_grid.html