minahark

Here is what I ended up doing: I downloaded the wp_options from the staging database and imported it o the new live database, since this was a theme options problem, not a css problem. Even though I lost some changes I had made to the current site, it was easier than doing the entire import again.

Some sites suggest to run a SQL query and replace all the old url fields with your new url. This can lead to many issues and caused some of my theme options to be erased in the first place. Still looking into how to completely migrate the db without messing up other features.

Hardeep,

Thanks so much for your reply. I want to do something a little different, though: I would like the featured image to display as a parallax header just like on the homepage, is there a shortcut to implement this on this theme, since it’s a similar structure as the honepage?

I am not using a child theme as of now, but I will probably switch to that if it makes it easier to do this.

Thank you very much!

@Hardep Thanks! I have exactly this on that line:

add_image_size( 'post-thumbnail-large', 825, 1000, true ); /* blog thumbnail */

And yet the theme crops the image to like 825×200 :S

Thanks so much for your help. I appreciate any hints from the developers.

Awesome, thanks so much!!

Good to know, thanks for your reply!

Thanks! Hope things get better for you!

@katie_thompson Would you mind providing your url to take a look? I am trying to do something similar and maybe I can help you with those details!

Yay!

@kmelvin this is because the theme is set to crop the images to fit the predetermined sizes for thumbnails and other versions of the featured image.

I assume you are talking about the image thumbnails on the front page under the “Latest news” section. You might be having issues because thaat thumbnail is set to be a perfect square, so if your images have a different aspect ratio, they will be cropped and not resized keeping your original aspect ratio. To change this go to functions.php in the theme directory and find
add_image_size('post-thumbnail', 250, 250, true);

Leave the first 250 (width) and correct the 250 to reflect your desired aspect ratio. This worked well for me, hope it helps! In that same section, you can change the way the theme crops images for different devices, make sure you check out what measurements work for you.

To keep in mind for the future, it would be a good idea to have your featured images always have the same dimensions.

@0to90 So, in this theme, the blog section is not very straightforward, but ot’s very simple, here is what you have to do:

– Create a new page called “Blog” and select one of the Blog templates under the “Template” dropdown. There are 2 options, one with large images and one with thumbnails. This page will load your blog posts in a feed, in the way you are used to see a blog page.
– Then add that page to your menu, if you want.

Hope this helps!

Ok, this was a dumb question, it was Jetpack’s infinite scroll. Just disabled it.

@avillabon

I believe this is how most professional web developers work, since it is simply not a good idea to implement changes on your live site that can affect the user experience and sites with a lot of traffic can not afford to have something going wrong during development, specially when it comes to big changes like templates or plugins.

As you accurately point out, such changes can mess up your site if there are compatibility or other issues, but it is simply a good idea to run with the latest versions of wp and plugins because of bug fixes and support.

I would think that for writing articles, you should be safe for the most part, posting directly on live site, however it seems a good idea to work on dev site and then deploy the changes just in case, however, your real issue is the other updates: wordpress and plugins. If you want to work on that, a staging site might be the best way to go about it. The process, though, is not straightforward or simple or clear. Since you are starting with git, I recommend you get familiar with how version control works and figure out what is the best platform for you, I like BitBucket because you can have private repositories for free, unlike Github.

Then, you need to use another tool to deploy changes to your live server, FTPloy and Diploy.io are 2 of the tools people use, they connect to your git repository and push the changes to your site.

Anyway, in doing this, I tried different versions of every tool available and ran into many unexpected errors, which is just part of the process, but at the end, figuring this out will take you to the next level as a wp user.

I wish I had tested a plugin to be able to recommend one, but I haven’t, I decided to do it the old fashioned way and it’s better for learning how things actually work.

In short: a staging environment is a great idea and protects you from major site crashes, but it’s not super easy, it takes time and you have to understand the basics or WordPress structure in order to do it well.

Best!

Yes, I did follow those guidelines and nothing. I’ll figure it out…

Ok, here is the code that worked for me, it’s simpler and so far, I haven’t found a weakness, but yet again, I don’t know what I’m doing. I replaced some code in the very standard twitter share button to include the username as a function and not hard-coded, as some examples of the code ask you to fill it in manually.

Full disclosure, I don’t fully comprehend the js portion at the end of @dori92’s code and I am using a simplified version, so please keep this in mind if there is something special reason to include that part.

Here it is:
<a href="https://twitter.com/share?url=<?php echo urlencode(wp_get_shortlink()); ?>&counturl=<?php urlencode(the_permalink()); ?>" class="twitter-share-button" data-count="vertical" data-via="<?php echo of_get_option( 'ac_twitter_username' ); ?>">Tweet</a><script type="text/javascript" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>

Remember to keep the span tags before and after this code, as in the standard code on justwrite’s documentation.

@dori_92 Thanks so much, it looks like this should work, but it didn’t for me. Will keep looking for the reason to this problem and post the answer.