Hello everyone, it’s wonderful to have found out about ClassicPress last night while a relative was pulling their hair out after being forced to move to WordPress’s block editor, which is both slow on their mobile data, and complicated as they have no need for any of the new features.
I have been exporting things from Wordpress (dot) com all night and importing them into ClassicPress, and I think I’ve got it to a reasonable point of completion (hosted on Cloudabove)
The main problem we’re having though, is the theme. It’s from around 2012 and I found it on the ClassicPress theme page but it would seem to be an older version.
I have used some additional CSS to get the site description and pages matching with the old WordPress site, but on the homepage with all the posts, the images are displayed small until you click on the post to read it. Additionally all images on posts have a border but I’m thinking this can be solved with some more CSS.
I can’t export the theme from WordPress since the person I’m setting this up for is not on a premium plan.
Any ideas on what we should do next?
From a search it appears to be a themehybrid theme.
Your old site sports the Saga child theme flavour.
I was not able to find a reliable download link, however it is possible that the theme older versions are somewhere on github for download.
To be precise, visiting WP.com theme repo a theme can be downloaded from its info page, but this specific theme is retired, so it’s not possible to download it from there anymore.
Edited to add:
I knew there was a way.
You can grab the theme from this SVN tool.
This may be too late now but the best way to move your WordPress sites to ClassicPress is by using our migration plugin. This is described here:
The plugin currently works with WordPress up to version 5.5.3 but we’re working on an update to make it compatible with 5.7.x. There’s no need to export/import anything. Just install the plugin on your WordPress site, follow the simple instructions and you’ll be running ClassicPress in no time.
Regarding the theme, if I understand correctly, you’re using Retro-fitted by Justin Tadlock. This can still be downloaded from the WP repo:
That will be the latest version that exists. The theme can also be installed from within WP and CP via Appearance - Themes - Add New and then enter retro-fitted in the search box.
We’re migrating from a non-self hosted Wordpress instance (wordpress.com) so I manually moved everything over!
I then installed the Retro-fitted theme as searched and found on the Themes section on ClassicPress, and I’m beginning to think maybe it’s actually too new of a version
It looks like the only part I am in need of rescuing from Wordpress.com is home.php, or the layout of the home page?
I’m not sure how to do that as the person I’m doing this for is using a free wordpress plan with just a domain, so there’s no access to any of that sort of stuff
Really the only thing I need to achieve is getting the post to show its picture at full-size, so maybe I could have a look at home.php myself?
Thanks all for your assistance on this, I do realise we’re talking about a nearly 9-year-old theme but the person I’m doing this for hates change, which is exactly why we’re here!
To get the layout of the home page, right-click somewhere on the page that is not a link and select View Page Source. This will open a separate tab. Then hit Ctrl + F and search for <body. That’s where the relevant HTML begins.
That’s okay! We found out about ClassicPress when the person I’m helping with this wanted to see other people’s reactions to the forced block editor. We went to Twitter.
Searches for people’s outrage led us to ClassicPress - I knew it would be extremely ambitious to move from him managing it entirely to me making sure the host is okay and him using ClassicPress, but because of it solving exactly the problem he was having, we were both inclined to take the plunge and buy a package at Cloudfront, and see how things would go (so far things are looking great )
I have solved all the problems with the theme by adding some additional CSS, we’re still having the homepage problem but that is a small price to pay buy in large.
Thanks for helping, everyone
On a first glance, the old homepage seems to be using the modern, recently implemented HTML5 imgsrc / picture responsive image format with a bigger image size, probably using the ‘medium’ image size instead the default ‘thumbnail’ size. Digging a bit more into the code, its revealed the theme actually uses a specific image size called ‘saga-featured’ (found in the functions.php):
On the new site, it looks like as if the default option is in use, ie. the ‘thumbnail’ image size, which normally is set to 150x150.
One should be able to replace the image size in use (specifically, from ‘thumbnail’ to ‘saga-featured’) - which would solve the problem. If not, then there might be a different issue, too, ie. that the different sizes have not been generated yet.
BUT: they should auto-generate when called first. If not, then there could be an additional issue with the write access to the uploads directory.
cu, w0lf.
ps: I’m used to these oodles of fun, because I’m regularly upgrading sites for clients, to either WP 5.x or CP, and have had to retroport quite a few themes and plugins, esp. if the site owner dont want any particularly obvious changes to their site(s).
Thanks for that piece of info! I have changed that now, and apart from the homepage of collectireland.net still showing a cut-off summary of each post’s text, they are pretty happy with how it looks!
One final query he had though, is if we would be able to add a Pageviews widget to the sidebar once again. It seems it was built-in on WordPress, but I must have tried about 10 or 11 different plugins I’ve added, to no avail. He’s not looking for anything fancy, just something to display the total amount of site views (as seen on the sidebar of collectireland.com). Apart from that, everything else has been smooth sailing, I’m delighted to report
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