3 Questions for price of one!

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Artmaestro March 14, 2015 at 5:11 pm

Heads up! this post was created when Microthemer was at version 3. The current version is 7. Some references to the interface may be out of date.

Greetings Sebastian-the-Magnificently-Brilliant (in case you thought you were going to get rid of me). Woke up early and began to play with Themeover. Have three questions:
questions:

Question 1: Re icreate.bz, in my sidebar I have a featured post type plugin that happily pops up images of my artwork in different proportions, and usually overall too large for the sidebar. I want to use Themeover to set a maximum size for the largest dimension (h or w) and then want the smaller dimension to not be fixed at a maximum size but rather to adjust downwards proportionately (aaah we artists are pains, aren’t we?). To that end, I set a max height and width each at 200. Having done that, now it seems to be forcing everything square. What I did: to achieve this magnificent feat of doing it wrong: I used the target selector img.wp-post-image and put it in the sidebar folder (had to call it try 2 with that name, took two attempts to still fail miserably), then picked max width as 200 and max height as 200 in the resizing menu. I know the video shows that in the borders menu you can pick something to make it stay proportionate – can you do that with images (and how)?

Question 2: Re icreate.bz, I want the site title at the very top to change on every page – but Themeover seems to want it to be done page by page. I tried targetting at various levels and saving it under the header folder, but no success, so I tried NOT targetting – what is up there now is my last not targetting attempt (just creating new, but it didn’t work for me either way).

Question 3: Oddly in Aim.bz I could get Themeover to recognize the uploaded webfonts (the easiest one to find is named Zelda), but I can’t get Themeover in icreate.bz to recognize Zelda or any of the others. Any suggestions?

I love the drop down shadow effect on my artwork. I’ve loads to do on icreate.bz – I intend to start Themeover-izing everything from scratch once I can access the web fonts I uploaded and know how to fix the side bar, etc. What you see now is just silly playing around and learning. Fyi, that will be the fourth time I start from scratch, but I get a little better every time! Really good stuff!

Artmaestro March 14, 2015 at 8:14 pm

Follow up:

Question 1 still remains a question, plus I found an unintended (by me anyway) consequence: Not only did the images in the side bar all become 200×200, but the featured image in a particular blog post header also became 200×200. I must have done something very wrong! Anyway, I deleted the selector I had made that was responsible for resizing any post image in the sidebar, and that solved the resize in the post featured header image as well. So now my question 1 is: Is it possible to resize images that randomly appear in a featured post plugin on the sidebar so that even though some are rectangular and some are square, each image resizes proportionately? If it is, can it be done in a way that does not impact the featured image in the blog post header?

Question 2 has been resolved ( for anyone who has the same question, by 1. navigating to a different page on my site that didn’t have the site title showing up yet; 2. double clicking the site title; 3. targeting div#site-title a, then saving in the Header folder, then choosing font, etc. that I want. HURRAY! Fyi, Sebastian, that same targetting process didn’t work when I stayed on the same page, don’t know if that was your intent or not.

Question 3 remains.

I’m loving this plugin, FABULOUS!

Artmaestro March 14, 2015 at 9:45 pm

and another thing! (Keeping in mind my fav quotation is Einstein’s “As the circle of light increases, so does the circumference of darkness around it.”):
New Question 4: I think I’m making progress in understanding the flow and everything. On the main menu, the background used to be black and I changed it to one of your lovely gradients. However, the drop down menu backgrounds are still an ugly blackish color – anyway to change that? I’ve tried doing somethings, found out how to get a dark bar over a particular item in a drop down menu, but what I want to do is change the whole drop down menu background. Is that possible.

and I forgot to mention – HAPPY Pi DAY!

Sebastian March 15, 2015 at 8:47 am

Hi Nicole!

A1: Yes it is possible. I will deal with the issue of targeting more elements than intended first.

I think I previously advised you to generally choose the broadest option you can on the Targeting tab by dragging the slider down as far as it will go before you target too many things (as indicated by the blue highlighting). I see that you have dutifully followed this sage advice with your img.wp-post-image selector. I neglected to suggest an additional check however – other pages. Once you’ve dragged the selector wizard to a point where the blue highlighting looks right. It’s sometimes worth navigating to other pages on the site. If your selector targets other images for instance, they will be covered in with blue highlighting when you move onto other pages with the selector wizard still open. You can then re-adjust to a more specific selector by dragging the slider up. I could cheat and tell you that the selector you need is:

#sidebar img.wp-post-image

But I fear that might be detrimental to your learning 🙂

Once you have successfully created your sidebar image selector, you can make the images proportional by setting width and height to ‘auto’ and max-width to ‘200px’ or ‘100%’ (100% would work too because the parent container sets the width of 200px).

A2: I’m glad you found a solution to this. The reason you needed to create different selectors for the home page and all other pages is that the twenty ten theme uses slightly different HTML markup for site title on the home page compared to all other pages. On the home page it is a h1 element. On all other pages it is a div element. You could modify your home page selector from this:

h1#site-title a

To this:

#site-title a

And then it will work and the homepage and all other pages. Then you can delete the other selector that uses div#site-title a.

A3: It’s possible that the fonts didn’t install correctly on create.bz. What method did you use to install the custom fonts? Feel free to send over login details for icreate.bz.

A4: Yes this is possible. I can see why you had trouble with this though. The selector you need is:

.sub-menu a

But the selector wizard won’t ‘find’ that when it scans for suggestions. The selector wizard doesn’t suggest every possible permutation of CSS selector code as this could often lead to many 100s of suggestions. However, looking at your site I can see the need for it to widen it’s net ever so slightly. I’m currently working on some major improvements for the selector wizard. I have added this to the list now. In the meantime, you may just have to cheat again and copy and paste my suggested ‘.sub-menu a’ selector into Microthemer. And then choose a different background color to replace the grey.

Happy Pi day (for yesterday)!

Sebastian

Artmaestro March 17, 2015 at 10:45 pm

Hi Sebastian-the-Magnificently-Brilliant!
Successes on the Font question (A3) and the drop down menu background question (A4) – I am so glad to learn these things, it’s just great! A4 in particular taught me new skills, will come in handy! A2 resolved previously. For anyone reading this series of Q&A, what worked with the font was putting quotes around the font name when I typed it into the Microthemer font menu, per Sebastian’s instructions. I.e., if you have an uploaded font that has more than one word in its font name, use quotation marks when you type the name into Microthemer’s font menu so Microthemer can find it.
That leaves….
Pesky, Persnikety, Pain-in-the-Patooty Problem 1 about the various images in the sidebar not resizing. What I tried: I used the skills about manually creating a selector that you taught me to solve A4 to similarly do this A1 task and entered #sidebar img.wp-post-image as the coding in the selector. In the dimensions menu, I tried not only setting the width and height to ‘auto’ and max-width to ‘200px’ (and I also tried ‘100%’), but I also tried every combination known to man of putting in auto and 200px and 100% and 200 (no px) sprinkled all over the various width and height boxes (OK, maybe that’s an exaggeration, how about every combination known to my dog?). Nothing seemed to happen to the images at all. The images in the sidebar that I needed to resize didn’t shrink, they didn’t grow, they didn’t meet Alice and the White Rabbit, nothing. Leaving no stone unturned, I also tried all three options in the last drop down menu (blank, content box, etc). I’m ‘a thinkin this could be something having to do with the third party plugin that randomly generates those images? I mean “user error?” – no waaaaay man (ok, WAY, but do I have to admit that here, publicly???)
Also, a new question…. numero 5: Is there any way just to change the font/color/etc of one otherwise drab, indistinguishable, peon-of-a-word within a whole sentence/paragraph (or one sentence or one paragraph within a whole essay) without changing anything around it? For example, in the prior sentence, making only the word ‘one’ be Google Font Titillium Web, size 20, Bold 500, color #FF0066 ? That level of individual detail maybe is beyond the scope of what Microthemer was intended to do (since maybe that’s not a CSS issue), but Themeover is soooo cool a plugin I thought maybe it was possible anyway 🙂
Thank you again for all your help so far! Hope all is fun and well, happy, happy to you and yours 🙂
Smiles,
-Nicole-of-the-Thousand-Questions (only 995 questions to go!) (um, do the first questions that didn’t have numbers count??? Then it’s less, more like 993 questions to go or something like that, let me know when I run out!)

Sebastian March 18, 2015 at 1:47 pm

Whoops! I gave you some bad advice. I totally made up the ‘#sidebar img.wp-post-image’ selector in my head. There is no ‘#siderbar’ element on your site with that ID. I’m terribly sorry for letting you try out all those futile combinations of auto and 200. The selector I should have suggested is actually:

#primary img.wp-post-image

You can verify this by clicking the highlighting icon in the top toolbar after your update the selector. It should highlight all images in your right sidebar. Then try out the auto/max-width values.

(we are talking about the icreate.bz site right?)

A5: This is possible, but it may require you to add some HTML to your content via the ‘Text’ tab on the text editor (next to the ‘Visual’ tab) when editing a Post or Page in WordPress . You can only apply different CSS styles to content that has been separated by HTML tags. So imagine you had the following sentence:

I want to target only a portion of this text.

If you changed it to the following:

I want to <span class="nicoles-class">target only a portion</span> of this text.

It would then be possible style the text ‘target only a portion‘ differently from the rest (because you’ve segmented the text using the span tag). Once you’ve added the span tag via the Text tab of the WordPress editor and saved the post/page, go back to Microthemer and you will find that if you double-click the ‘target only a portion‘ bit of text Microthemer will highlight only that text. And if you go to the targeting tab of the selector wizard you will see that it is picking up your custom class. Among the various options will be one that looks like:

span.nicoles-class

(assuming you didn’t change ‘nicoles-class’ to something else, which you are free to do)

This involves adding some HTML code which may not be ideal for many. But I think it’s within your capable capabilities. You may find my free divup content plugin quite useful for segmenting WordPress post/page content without having to use the ugly Text tab on the editor. It doesn’t let you insert spans at the moment (just divs which are better for separating blocks of content) but I may add support for this soon for the benefit of Microthemer users.

Please let me know how you get on!

Cheers,
Sebastian

Artmaestro March 18, 2015 at 6:44 pm

The #primary img.wp-post-image worked! -As did the span coding! Lovely! Just getting rid of those awful cutoff sidebar images is worth the price of this plugin (and more!) That always bothered me! What’s the point of painting a whole picture if only half the picture shows? What if the half that is missing is the better half? If the better half arrives at a forest and there is no one there to see it…

I am so HAPPY! I just redirected all my domain names that were pointing at the old 3.2 to this new and far more lovely 4.1 site. That doesn’t mean I’m totally done, I just want to work more on the menu bar and little tweaks, but the worst is over. With this fun plugin I will never be done, too fun to try new things! This plugin is amazing, your customer support is awesome, can’t thank you enough for breathing fresh air into my old site.

Sample page before Themeover: http://artimagination.hypermart.net/wordpress1/about/
Same sample page after Themeover: http://Nicole.bz

Artmaestro March 18, 2015 at 9:29 pm

Further to my last post, I forgot to mention something I’ve been experiencing. When I use Themeover and make changes to a particular page, save it, then hit the (W) to go back to WordPress, then go to edit that same page in WordPress, everything within a few key strokes kind of goes greyed out and hangs up. I imagine it’s a conflict of some sort. RIght now I have a typo (inspiraton instead of inspiration) appearing in a few places on this page: http://icreate.bz/books/tempo-the-rhythm-and-rhyme-of-the-artist/
SO what happened is that first I beautified the page using Themeover, and then I exited Themeover using the (W), then I went to that page using the generic WordPress page editor, and then I tried to fix the typos and couldn’t save it and no way to get anything on the dashboard to work either. I got out of it by using the view page button in the editor and right clicking to open the page in a new tab, and then logging out using the newly opened tab, and then going back and closing out the still hung up dashboard. I still haven’t been able to change that typo, I’m hoping time will make the problem go away. (Good ol Ostrich approach, works so well on so many things). If when you read this I’ve been able to change that inpiraton typo, that means ‘hail to the Ostrich approach!’ Fyi, I’ve had this happen in other instances where I worked too closely on the same page on the two interfaces (Themeover vs the generic WordPress editor). Logging in and out a few times and passage of times seemed to resolved the other times, hope this inspiraton one is the same. Any suggestions?


Artmaestro March 19, 2015 at 12:02 am

Phooooey! I still can’t get to the point where I can correct the various inspiraton typos on the http://icreate.bz/books/tempo-the-rhythm-and-rhyme-of-the-artist/ page because my regular pages edit space just won’t let me edit ANY page now. It worked earlier today (that’s how I was able to do the span thing you taught me). I’ve tried different browsers on my PC, cleared cache, used microthemer restore to restore to a slightly earlier time – nothing seems to allow me to once again edit any of my pages through the regular WordPress dashboard page editing screen. I even tried logging into my site from my ipad, NO matter how I try, every time I tried to edit a page, everything greys out. It seems to be true for ANY page now. At least the site looks great while it’s in limbo! I know you’ll have the answer, will stop trying for awhile, since my attempts definitely not making things better!

Artmaestro March 19, 2015 at 4:05 am

Hi Sebastian,
Not one to give up, I discovered I could fool the edit page problem by (on my iPad) opening the restore past auto save in a new tab, and by using that auto save (that I couldn’t save using update due to the hanging up problem) getting the typo fixed that way, BUT I still can’t update or edit any pages in the usual way. Everything still gets grayed out and hangs up. Ostrich approach not working, problem hasn’t miraculously disappeared on its own. My intuition is that somehow the traditional wordpress page editor thinks Microthemer still working on that page, so it’s hanging up. Is that possible? -or perhaps my traditional wordpress page editor went on a drunken bender…
Look forward to hearing your thoughts.
I’m tempted to try deactivating Microthemer and re activating again, but I’m afraid the whole site will disappear or that I’ll lose all my work, or that an ancient pyramid 5,000 miles away will topple or something,
What actually would happen to all my customizations if I deactivate Microthemer? Then what would happen if I re activate it again?
Gosh, I was so close to being DONE!

Sebastian March 19, 2015 at 4:56 am

Hi Nicole,

I’ve logged into your site and I think I’m getting the same issue as you – when I try to save the page the screen has a grey overlay that doesn’t disappear, and the changes don’t save. But I don’t think it’s caused by Microthemer. I deactivated Microthemer and the problem remains. Your styles are perfectly safe. Microthemer can be completely uninstalled and your settings will still be there is you reinstall and activate later. I also created an export backup, like you did yesterday just to be safe.

Right now my two best guesses are:

  1. A problem was introduced when you edited your site via the ‘Text’ tab as per my instructions. Although if the problem is page specific it wouldn’t be affecting all pages as you say. Does the problem arise when creating a completely new post/page?
  2. Some other plugin or update is causing the problem. Have you installed anything new or updated anything else recently?

I’m heading out for the day now but can revisit this this evening (in about 7 hours).

Cheers,
Sebastian

ps feel free to reactivate Microthemer after confirming that the page editing problem persists are your end while Microthemer is inactive.

Artmaestro March 19, 2015 at 6:35 am

Sad downtrodden….greetings….Eor has possessed my website…
Problem still remains. I did re activate, at least it’s pretty again!
What I did today:
Microthemed to my heart’s content
I changed the main menu link structure ( children’s books etc moved under books) and reordered main menu slightly, all using the dashboard/appearance/menus , nothing extraordinary there. I think I did that yesterday, actually.
I changed fonts to victor Hugo in a few places, including a few times using the span tags, including
once is in the portfolio widget in the sidebar. Not every page has the same main header font now. It started out all in one font, today I manually changed a few of those headers to victor Hugo using regular selector process.
I did the auto resize thing and added loads of drop shadows all over site, in the ecwid, sidebar, body, etc. Basically every image has a shadow now, love those.
Because I thought the site was ‘stylin cool, I ran a manual backup using two different backup plugins ( both already installed) first with wpbackup but I was worried backup size too small at only 2 gigs so then backed up again with updraft plugin, also already installed. While I didn’t install a new plugin or add a plugin update, I did in the backup dashboard settings fiddle with the backup schedule settings and number of backups to save. This was done before the serious problem started. I guess the good news is that gives us two different recent backups?
I re-routed all my domain name pointers on the host server to point to the icreate.bz site, before the serious problem started.
I don’t recall doing anything else, not even a new post. I was beautifying on that particular page when I spotted the inspiraton typos. I hit the (W) and went to correct the inspiration typos. Thats when the current problem started. Something similar had happened on other times I used Microthemer on the same page I was editing, but I could always get it to go away. I tried those methods but this time couldn’t solve problem. After problem wouldn’t go away I tried editing other pages and it seemed the problem was worse than before. In hopes of getting the hangup distracted so that it would stop, I tried adding a page. That not totally successful – hung up in add process but then later unnamed empty page appeared on list of pages. I could not delete page easily, got fail message, but finally I deleted page using quick edit. Have not tried adding or editing a post, don’t want to give post editor any ideas! I have noticed that opening things in a new tab helps a teeny tiny bit, but things clearly not normal.
As mentioned previously, I did notice a more milder form of this problem yesterday, seemed to be when I attempted editing same page immediately prior open in Microthemer. It happened more than once yesterday but more mildly, solution has been to logout, go back to Microthemer and put it on a different page, seemed to solve it. I thought, duh, of course can’t work on same thing in two different places, didn’t seem a big deal until today when serious unresolved problem kept going.

I didn’t update any plugins (if it ain’t broke then I taint messin with it). I didn’t install any new plugins (pinkie swear). I did research backup plugins, but stuck with the two I mentioned above. I also looked at the plugin you mentioned, decided to wait til all my beautification done. All a long winded way of saying: I think the backup you have of the site would have an identical list of plugins, all the same version as on the site now. If something is different I don’t remember doing it.
I did reactivate the plugin again, thanks for the courage!

Oh phooey! It looks so pretty! I do need to be able to edit page text and add pages though! Maybe I overworked it?

Thanks for your continued help – this one does have me in a bit o panic! Am glad to have Sebastian The Magnificently Brilliant on my side 🙂
-Nicole

Sebastian March 19, 2015 at 7:21 am

Hi Nicole,

No need to panic, I’m sure we can get to the bottom of it. Would you mind if I temporarily disable your ‘TinyMCE Generic WP Shortcode Editor’ plugin? That’s my best guess at this stage. When I inspect the WordPress post/page editor using firebug I can see the following error:

Deprecated TinyMCE API call: .onNodeChange.add(..)

And when I look at the plugin page on wordpress.org I see that it hasn’t been updated in 2 years (and there is a warning about compatibility): https://wordpress.org/plugins/tinymce-generic-wp-shortcode-editor/

I’ve got some time to kill while I wait in the airport lounge so can do this now if you give me the go ahead.

Cheers,
Sebastian

Artmaestro March 19, 2015 at 1:55 pm

Oh thank you, Knight of the Code! Sir Sebastian, permission granted! I feel so much better now that you’re working on it, THANK YOU!
Bon Voyage!
Nicole

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