Sal

Thanks for responding Randy, I have put a call into my host in case they can help (clearly I’m not much of a techie), and I will look at the link you gee and try looking at the permissions.

I’ll post if I get it solved. Any other suggestions welcome!

Actually, I want to add that when doing the multiple manual installs/updates I left the wp-admin and the wp-includes folders untouched (as per the official WP manual installation instructions). I think all of the error messages have included a file in one of these folders (see examples in my original post).

Should I be replacing files in those folders, and if so… um, can anyone tell me which ones? So far the manual updates have not disturbed any of the site’s content so I’d love for that to remain intact!

The theme is old an no longer supported so I will be changing it before too long but I want to get it straightened out for now.

THANK YOU photocrati! I had not tried exactly this combination of actions.
The first time I tried your advice it didn’t work so I cleared out my browser history and tried again then the new installation worked as it should. I’m SO glad it’s not the theme (at least not this time ;).
I’ll delete the old short code and place the galleries with the new green button. Yay NextGEN!

Right. And future updates can be crucial to the existence of the site over time—this is my primary concern because I’m used to making and working on sites that are not tied to a subscription.

I’d like to know, from people who use premium (subscription) themes, what it’s like when they stop working on such a site. Are there any problems when you need to to hand the maintenance of a client’s site, for whatever reason, over to another designer (who, chances are, doesn’t subscribe to that theme, right?)?

So, I’m new to the premium theme scene and just want to know if working with premium themes is risky or if it’s simply a price clients need to factor in if they want a good, flexible WP site?

Thanks.

Takayuki, Changing the style of the text (size, line spacing, bold and italic) was easy with CSS. But do you know why the paragraph and break tags that appear automatically in the Form section of the Contact settings seem to do nothing – when I delete them nothing changes and when I add them nothing happens.
Anyway, I’m working around this problem by adding a paragraph w nonbreaking space (also styling it with smaller line height to reduce size of space):
<p style=”line-height:50%;”> </p>

I found that I WAS at least able to style the text using inline tags! but I still can’t change the paragraphs.