Thread

how do I change the template/theme? I want to go from Butterfly to Kixi (or any other). How do I do this?

You have two options:

1) You could copy/paste the source from the Kiwi template in the template library into its respective templates on your site.

2) Create a new weblog and choose Kiwi from the drop-down - you’ll need to have kiwi uploaded to /themes/site_themes/ first.

You might also read about one click theming.

This is a good enough reason for me to not choose EE.

I am evaluating EE but if themes are so hard to change, that makes evaluation considerably more difficult.

At installation when it asked what theme I wanted to use (non-commercial version), it only had Default but had links to other themes. I downloaded one of them (Notebook), and dropped it into the site_themes folder. On refresh, it showed up and I chose it.

It looked fine until I added my first post, then it no longer displayed my site’s title, description or any of the posts.

Now the first thing to try when something like that happens is to go back to a “pure” setup. That is, use the default theme. After spending the best part of an hour looking over and over thru all the settings in EE, I searched here only to discover first Rick’s post and then this one, which both tell me changing themes is not simple. So now I have to go thru some convoluted process just to find out if my site’s problem is in the theme or something else. And what’s more, if its the theme, how do I know how to debug it??! So normally I’d just go choose another theme. But there’s that pain of having to change themes again.

There needs to be a massive warning in 144 point type that says “Be careful what theme you choose here because it’s near impossible for newbies to change the theme once installed.”

If you are going to provide a non-commercial version of EE, you also need to make changing themes easy, because those people don’t have the money to pay a theme designer to get it right, nor the time to learn how and to then change the theme. K.I.S.S.

How hard can it be to have the themeing section of the installer run over your site with a new theme? Yes it’s going to cause problems if your new theme is significantly differently structured to your old one, but how hard is it to warn folks of this and - with EE’s versioning - keep a copy of the old setup for rollback?

It makes me wonder why EE even bothers with a non-commercial version. As Rick says, those sorts of folks (i.e. who want to easily change themes themselves rather than paying someone or copious amounts of their own time to do what should be possible by the click of a button) shouldn’t be using EE.

I’ll drink to that!

thanks for ignoring my little tanty, Lisa. Now that I’ve gotten over myself, I’ll go study your “Dissecting the default template” tute.

thanks. 😊