How to preview a new theme
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Is there any way to preview / see the impact on existing published webpages of a new theme? It seems that on the premium and partner ones, there is a preview/customise option; in others, notably almost all the free ones, this option is missing, replaced by a screen showing demo site.
It seems completely unreasonable in trying to move from a retired theme to a newer one that there is no way to see the impact of the changes, before having to activate the new theme, This feature means I cannot go back and so would have to somehow customise our published, active site whilst in Live – is that right?
Online help does not explain this in any detail! Thanks
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hi @ssntvrb due to the way that some of our older themes are created, there is not an easy way to preview them. In other cases previews are available. For example, you should see the option to preview all themes listed here: https://wordpress.com/themes/all/free/filter/full-site-editing/ssntv.co.uk
If there is a theme you are interested in that is not on the list I’ve shared, please let us know and we can take a closer look and advise you. Thanks!
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Hello @staff-totoro thanks for the response, apologies for not replying sooner.
- Can I just check something please – if someone posts a reponse and the “notify me of new replies” box is ticked, how do I get that feedback / notification? In the past wasn’t there an email to my account? Now I’m not sure – i’ve no junk replies, but I don’t think I was notified about your reply, until I went to the forums home page and my profile there?
2. We’ve seen there is a newer template Barnsbury, compared with our existing retired one, so we’d like to investigate this one. I tried out Twenty Twenty-Four with the “Prview & Customise” button. But there’s no equivalent with Barnsbury to do the same. Can you help? Thanks.
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Hi again,
We’ve seen there is a newer template Barnsbury, compared with our existing retired one, so we’d like to investigate this one. I tried out Twenty Twenty-Four with the “Prview & Customise” button. But there’s no equivalent with Barnsbury to do the same. Can you help? Thanks.
For the most part, changing your theme is a lot like changing the clothing on a mannequin. Your content (pages, blog posts, uploaded media) don’t go anywhere or change that much… they just assume the style of the new theme.
One exception is the homepage template, as different themes approach setting up the homepage differently, so the settings of your old theme may not apply. That would be the case if you were to move to the Barnsbury theme. For the most part your content will come over just fine. We are able to preview (to a limited extent) using our internal tools, so this is what your homepage would look like if you were to switch.
<br data-rich-text-line-break=”true”>So you can see that the main content of the page is still there, and uses the fonts and colors of the Barnsbury theme. However, you would still need to put a bit of time into setting up the site header and menu, as well as some time in setting up the homepage if you wish to look like the homepage that Barnsbury uses. But for the internal pages of your site (any page other than the homepage) you are hardly “starting over” and your content will look very much as it does now.
And I will be honest, the theme you are using now is one we retired a while ago now, so any theme you switch to is likely to need a bit of setup work. This does not need to be difficult however. For example, in a recent webinar we show how to create a custom homepage layout in a short time:
Can I just check something please – if someone posts a reponse and the “notify me of new replies” box is ticked, how do I get that feedback / notification? In the past wasn’t there an email to my account? Now I’m not sure – i’ve no junk replies, but I don’t think I was notified about your reply, until I went to the forums home page and my profile there?
You should get an email notifications, as well as the notifications in your bell icon shown in the upper right. Have you not seen an email letting you know of this reply?
If not, can you share a screenshot of what you see in your end, the box to get email updates is checked you had mentioned, yes?
Thanks for the additional info!
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Thanks for the screenshot and explanation – make sense. But I have one key question – looking at some of the templates most now have limited colour templates, if we were to migrate from our “green”, our inital research seemed to suggest we’d have to pay for the use of “custom” colours. The reason we initially liked the look of Barnsbury theme was that the example in the templates pages online was green. The one you’ve screenshotted, is however the now more typical, dull grey / brown / tan. Would green be available as a free template? Thanks for clarifying.
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#2 Regarding the tracking notifications – I have the Jetpack app and have seen that I get forum notifications there. But there are no emails currently into my email apps But I think I have notifications enabled via the set up below? I cannot however see a setting related to emails at account / user level in addition – is that correct? Thanks.
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Hi again,
The one you’ve screenshotted, is however the now more typical, dull grey / brown / tan. Would green be available as a free template? Thanks for clarifying.
This has more to do with the fact that when you try out a theme, it does not give you the ability to set it up in the way that the demo shows. My screenshot can only show a simple activation of the theme, but the green color is something you can set for many of the individual elements on the site. On the homepage of the site it’s only used once in the layout, and that is for the box shown here:
That color is built into the default palette of the theme, so you can see it is also used for some text on the site as well, such as the “Home” link in the site navigation. The good news is that you can set the green color on individual elements of your site, even under the free plan.
our inital research seemed to suggest we’d have to pay for the use of “custom” colours. The reason we initially liked the look of Barnsbury theme was that the example in the templates pages online was green.
Upgrading to the Explorer plan would add to this the ability to set up a custom color palette, that is correct. By upgrading you would not be limited to the default colors of the theme. In this case you actually want to use the default color, so you would be all set here. :)
When you activate the theme (something I cannot show in my preview) the homepage template from the demo should be added automatically, so you can replace the text and images with your own. This means that if you were to activate Barnsbury, there may be a bit of setup required, but you would be able to set it up exactly as shown in the demo.
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