The New Theme Went Up Without a Hitch… But not Without a Glitch

Well, I switched to the new Frugal Premium blog theme; did you notice? Yeah, I know, it looks a lot like my old theme. But, I’ve always loved the look of my original theme and, to be honest, if it wasn’t for the fact that it wanted to morph into a Picasso painting every time there was a WordPress upgrade, I never would’ve changed.

One of the great things about WordPress is that there are so many free themes out there. If you look hard enough, you’ll find a theme that is exactly what you’re looking for. Having said that, if you’re serious about blogging—especially if your goal is to become a  professional blogger—it is imperative you either hire a reliable programmer, or at least choose a theme with a dedicated support system.

Since the income generated at Dead Rooster does not yet justify adding a full-time programmer to my staff, I went with purchasing a theme with a stellar support system.

Obviously, the support system wasn’t the only reason I chose Frugal Premium; I really liked the ease in which you can change nearly every aspect of the theme without writing a single line of code.  I’m referring to sophisticated features such as Static Home Pages, Multiple Sidebar Configurations, Featured Article Sections and countless other items. You can even get into the minute details of the theme—still, without coding—such as the navigation bar attributes:

And that’s just the NavBar! There are similar control panels for nearly every other aspect of this theme.

But uploading my new theme didn’t go flawlessly; I ran into a few glitches related to my previous tinkering with the old theme. For instance, I created a stand-alone blogroll page framework so I could have a separate “links” page and not have to list every link in the sidebar of  every page. Well, when I switched over, my new theme didn’t include this framework, so all of my blogroll links disappeared!

…and, I forgot what I did to create that page in the first place!

I tried some plugins that were supposed to do the same thing, but they didn’t work for me. This jogged my memory and I remembered having the same problem with my previous theme causing me to create a special php file to get what I wanted.  If there’s any intrest, maybe I’ll write a blog post on how to do that in the future.

Anyhow, I wrote another php file for the new theme and my blogroll page is back to operational.

Another major glitch involved the avatars in the comment section (which I could never get to work with my old theme). Well, they started working too good, I was seeing multiple avatars for each comment. This was due to having multiple avatar plugins activated. Haha! Easily fixed.

Try leaving a comment on my blog and see if an avatar shows up. It’s supposed to load avatars from various places such as MyBlogLog. If you don’t see an avatar for you,  head over to  Gravatar.com and upload one (you don’t even have to have a blog) then come back and see if it loads.

If anyone wants to try Frugal, there is a free version available, but a lot of the really cool stuff is disabled.

Photo credit: Kainet

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