Today I purchased and installed the new theme for my WordPress site! That was an interesting and sometimes aggravating process. I began by reading the “Getting Started” document provided by the theme site, and walking through their steps. However after attempting to install the uploaded zip file on WP,  I received the message “The package could not be installed. The theme is missing the style .css style sheet. Theme installation failed.” I checked the installation section of the theme website for tips on this error message without any luck, but thankfully E.F. was available for a quick consult. Turns out it’s an easy fix: the theme company nests the theme zip inside another zip, all I had to do was unzip the first file before uploading the nested zip to WordPress. Unfortunately that was only the first of several issues.

The “help” docs on the theme site recommend that you check to make sure your server resources match the requirements for the chosen theme. In my case my “PHP Post Max Size” was only 128M, and the theme requires 256M. I had no idea what “PHP Post Max Size” even was, but a little research revealed that it’s the amount of data per post that can be stored in the WordPress database. In order to bump it up to the level required by the new theme, I needed to log in to my host company’s admin interface to see if I could adjust the level myself without having to open a tech support ticket with the hosting site.

Without my PLN contact I’m certain I would be waiting for company tech support, but together E.F. and I figured out what to do. We navigated to the CPanel admin interface and rooted around in the “Software” section until we found “PHP Options” under the  “PHP Selector” area. There we were able to adjust the level to the required amount. Success! Unfortunately the new theme still isn’t working right. What on earth is the issue now?!

After reading back through the help file and consulting with E.F., it turns out there was an important piece of information that I didn’t remember to check before purchasing my theme: when was it last updated? It turns out that WordPress made some big changes in the last couple years, and my theme wasn’t updated to work with the current version. Thankfully WP allows you to install the WP Classic plugin to address this very issue. Their WP Classic widget plugin is separate, so if you have this issue as I did, you’ll need to install that as well.

Now do things look as they should? Nope, things are still weird on my site: my images in the banner are not in the right location or the right size, the banner itself is too big and the links don’t appear unless you mouse over them. Ack, what the heck? I’m giving up, tomorrow is another day!

Photo by Mark Basarab on Unsplash