December 10, 2018

• Switched theme to Veni
• Switched Homepage Settings from Static to Blog Posts
• Set default fonts
• Set featured posts for homepage slider
• Wanted to feature posts in a specific order, so I installed ‘Post Types Order’ plugin as recommended by the theme author
• Switched the main editor to Gutenberg
• Set 3 featured pages on homepage
• Assigned featured images and cleaned up some post formatting

December 12, 2018

• Noticed alignment was off for the image in my last post
• Went to check in the editor that it was indeed center-aligned, but looking over at the frontend, clearly the formatting was not getting applied
• Tried adding an actual image to the post (non-gif) -> Preview -> image is not displayed in the Preview
• Went on to just Publish -> image is now seen on the published post (but still not aligned properly)

Therefore, decided not to move forward with Veni. While my goal was to have a site that mirrored Veni’s design, I also want it to work seamlessly with a theme compatible with Gutenberg.

December 13, 2018

• Switched theme from Veni to Rosalie
• Realized sites on a BIZ plan like mine will have certain widgets removed. In this case, one of the theme’s featured elements, the IG feed which is controlled by the IG Widget.
• Downloaded the recommended workaround plugin ‘Instagram Feed’
• Mucked around for a good 20 minutes trying to get the builtin account authorization to work to no avail.
• Downloaded ‘Instagram Feed by 10Web’ and used that as an alternative solution for now
• Modified a bunch of pages
• Set frontpage from static to latest posts -> modified number of posts displayed on the frontpage to 6 posts
• Added and modified an ‘About’ widget
• Added MailChimp Subscriber widget
• Added and modified menu items

The Revamped Site

Thoughts

I had a lot of fun with this little refresh project! I realize that there’s still clearly much more improvement that could be done in regards to making a theme setup more intuitive. Although, that topic could be saved for a whole different post.

Basically, not everything is as easy to setup as it seems. I happened to have got it done relatively quickly because I work with these common theme issues on a daily basis. But even with that, I still found myself yelling at certain limitations I stumbled upon.

After all, technology is suppose to… just work, right?