The blog’s look and feel is (mostly) updated!
Let’s all say a fond goodbye to Down the Road, v 4.0. I really liked the look and feel that template gave me, and I wish I could have kept it. Unfortunately, it’s an old template that isn’t maintained anymore, and little incompatibilities with modern WordPress were creeping in.
I spent five hours this morning editing my new template to look as I want it, or as much as I could manage. As you can see, I mimicked my old template’s look and feel.
I used the Theme Editor to customize the look and feel here. The Theme Editor gives a good amount of control, within your template’s limits. It works like the WordPress block editor, so if you have good skills with it, you’ll be able to make your way with the Theme Editor.
However, I learned how much I don’t know about WordPress blocks during my customization adventure. There are special blocks for various common elements on the page. There are also special blocks used to arrange elements that I had never seen before. I learned a lot about these blocks by looking at the theme’s default blocks in the Theme Editor.
I’m not sure I can fully explain how I got everything to work, because so much of this was trial and error until it looked right enough. But here it is.
I haven’t figured out yet how to do two things. First, I want to change the font styling on image captions to be smaller and italicized, so captions don’t look exactly like body text. Second, I want to edit my menu in the masthead. On other templates I’ve used, I did that in the Customizer. But that option isn’t available on this template, and I can’t figure out what to do there. I’ll update these things when I learn how.
With this update, I’ve switched from my main page showing the full text of my latest posts, to a grid of the nine most recent posts with a short excerpt from the post. This is just how my new theme works.
I’m trying these settings on for size, and may tweak things here and there in the coming weeks. Otherwise, this is what the blog now looks like!
