Hi,
I love the concept of this tool and the videos look awesome! I previously tried so-css and found it helpful but just didn’t go far enough… hence the move to purchase ThemeOver’s MicroThemer.
Bottom line: perhaps 20% of attempted changes have any affect. And, I’m still working with basics just trying to learn how to use the program.
I think there’s a good chance of User error or misunderstanding, but I’ve also tried step by step much of the videos and found nothing at all happens… no change.
I’ve tried this so far on 4 different themes
1. NewAmazeTheme – a membership theme based on bootstrap – almost nothing worked here…
2. ThriveTheme’s Rise Theme – more success here – perhaps 30% of attempted elements would change color or shape.
3. Custom Genesis Framework child theme – very very very simple theme. Little was affected by attempts with MT.
4. Artisteer Theme – would only allow manual insertion of css… no guided UI
5. Artisteer Theme 2 – this one could recognize a few elements but was a mess. For example trying to select the menu items to test changing their colors affected lots of other items. And, the changes did not show up dynamically. In some areas I had to save and then view the page. In other cases elaborate changes were made, but none of them were saved.
I spent about 3 hours tonight going through intro tutorials and trying to mimic them with little luck.
I’m disappointed in not getting much of anything to work, but not wanting to give up on the great possibilities.
So far there’s been success with a few of the basic H1, H2, H3 selections and color/font changes. However, most do not work. The change to small caps fro example from the intro video doesn’t work on about 90% of what I tried… color change worked on about 30% of the time. Trying to change rectangular corners of input fields to rounded worked about 50% of the time. See, I’m still working with very trivial elements that I could easily change in other ways. I’d love to get where I could delete and move around elements as shown in the sales video…. Not even close at this point.
I’m not sure where to go next and don’t have 20-30 hours of time to try and figure out how to master this program. Is there a known problem with current releases? Or these particular themes?
Any suggestions?
I’m willing to spend a few more hours but so far the ROI has been dismal… faint light at the end of the tunnel… wanting a big switch to turn on “Start Working Now (On/Off)”.
This is version 4.5.6 so I’d expect this to be a mature product – baffling as to why virtually nothing works. Maybe I need better behaved themes? (the reason for getting this tool is to work with themes that are a bit challenging to fix otherwise).
I’m sorry you’ve encountered some teething problems. My current guess is that your issues could either be due to an error in the program or the challenges of CSS. Microthemer generates the CSS code for you, but still has to play by the rules of CSS, which newbies struggle with sometimes. It’s possible to target the wrong elements sometimes, and then styles don’t appear to be working.
I’m almost finished writing a tutorial that aims to help users overcome these initial hurdles as well as design responsively. But in the meantime, it would help if you could post a link to your site with a description of one or more elements that you’ve failed to customize with Microthemer. I can then check if the element is being targeted correctly. Or, if you’d like me to check your install for program errors, please send login details for your site via this secure contact form: https://themeover.com/support/contact/
Glad to see there was a response. I’d been checking email every day and nothing came through – not in spam. Maybe the forum doesn’t send email notices?
I’ve had quite a bit of luck using other CSS tools such as SO-CSS and others – pretty straightforward. And, as long as I can inspect the element and figure out where to fit the change I can usually look up the correct css code to include.
I tried installing themeover on several different sites and got basically the same thing – it would not do anything.
Just spent the entire weekend moving all of my test sites to a new local server, so there’s not currently one out there.
I’ll build one in the next few hours and send login info. Would love to see this really work the way it seemed in the sales video.
There is actually a ‘Notify me of follow-up replies via email’ option at the bottom of the topic/reply form. It wasn’t checked by default before, but it is now. Thanks for sharing your experience on that.
Thanks also for giving me access to one of your sites. I did find some JavaScript errors that were preventing Microthemer from working properly:
The first error about PostMessage was generated by your Sociable plugin. This error may or may not have been interfering with Microthemer. Your Autoptimize plugin definitely was preventing Microthemer from working properly. The cannot read property replace of undefined error stopped Microthemer dead in its tracks when trying to create selectors or refresh the frontend styles.
Autotimize is one of three caching plugins you have installed on the site. W3 total cache and Cloudflare are also present. I don’t think you need Autotimize if you already have W3 Total cache. I’m not sure exactly what the CloudFlare plugin does but I know that cloudflare can cause problems for Microthemer users sometimes because it serves up cached content instead of up-to-date content that may have been restyled with Microthemer.
I’m wondering if the reason you had problems across multiple websites is because you have Cloudflare installed globally on your server and/or you have Autotimize installed on every site?
As a test, I’ve given your header a charcoal background color. Please feel free to delete this selector and have a play with Microthemer now that I’ve fixed the JavaScript errors. Hopefully things are working for you more predictably now. But if you run into more problems please let me know.
Hi Sebastian,
Thanks for your prompt and courteous reply.
now which site did i give you access for? lol… so many test sites sitting out there.
Honestly, i can’t find a way to see which one I sent to you.
Curious about the JS bugs. I do use Autooptimize a lot and Cloudflare, but will remember to turn those off when using Microthemer.
I spend another hour or so with it tonight and still finding a lot missing in figuring out how to use this.
Is there a simple video tutorial? Here’s how to do this this this and this?
For example, I was able to identify an element, then go to attempt to change it’s height. But apparently it was the wrong element because it changed the height of the one on top and immediately below it. Spend nearly the full hour trying to figure that one out.
Next, I have a sidebar that dropped to the bottom of the page. it’s on a custom post type, so I’m sure it just needs some width adjustment as I made the main page slightly more narrow.
But klunking around for 20 minutes with it, I can’t find any way to adjust what I want – lots of adjustments to parameters I don’t care about…
I don’t doubt that [some] things can be done with MT just so far the vast majority are misses… only a few hits.
Any expectation of when the tutorial will be available? Any chance of some video walk throughs as well?
Found the test site and would like to setup with a few examples that i’ve not been able to solve with MT.
1st – how do i get rid of the header changes you made?
a basic thing that is not obvious….
I would expect there might be some CSS code somewhere that I could edit or copy and move to a child theme.??
Is the only way to access these changes to go through the UI and 1 by 1 delete entries? I would hope there’s a way to export the css changes so as to not be permanently dependent on MT running.
To demonstrate the problem areas I’m going to overwrite the current test site and will forward new login info.
Sorry for the slow reply, I was fixing an important bug all day yesterday. I’ve just released version 4.6.5 and upgraded you on the site you gave me access to.
I notice that you found and removed my header selector.
If you click the <> icon in the top right of MT you can view/copy the CSS code Microthemer generates. You could copy this to a child theme. Or if can make use of the active-styles.css stylesheet even with Microthemer uninstalled. There is some code you can copy into your theme’s functions.php file on the ‘Inactive’ tab of the preferences if you want to do that (I would recommend that over copying any pasting so that you can edit the styles via the MT interface rather than having to edit the CSS code directly).
All of our documentation can be accessed from our support page, including the getting started video. The responsive design tutorial I’m working on provides some guidance on how to deal with nested HTML elements. It sounds like you bumped up against this when you tried to adjust the height of an element. I can’t say exactly when the tutorial will be ready.
By the way, if you’d prefer to wait roughly 6 months for more docs and more advanced selector targeting features I’d be happy to refund you now. You could then repurchase in future if you so choose.
Your timely responsiveness is excellent – no worries there. And really putting a lot of effort to supporting this.
I’m still having trouble getting basics to work… just now on the same test site wanting to resize the logo via MT and MT can’t find it… there’s a menu in the way, but I’d expect some means to reach it.
Rather than eating a ton of your time, I think your offer to refund is best.
I’d love to come back when more training is in place – and maybe less convoluted themes to work with.
You’re welcome Stephen. I’ve processed your refund now, you should receive notification from PayPal shortly. If you’d like to get notified about major updates and improvements please sign up to our newsletter.
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