WordPress.com is an easy way to start blogging. Get a blog, check out our features, read the latest announcements, choose from great themes, or learn about the team behind it.
Need help? Check out our Support site, then
My blog uses the Suburbia theme, the headings on the blog posts on the home page have become unreadable - light grey text on a grey background. I have removed any CSS tweaks, and tried changing the colours, but nothing works.
I also tried activating another theme, then coming back to Suburbia, and I'm stuck.
Help please?
The blog I need help with is theotcspace.com.
Themes Staff have been improving themes and Suburbia is among them. See here > http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/feature-images-are-suddenly-really-tiny?replies=2#post-1063872
The improvement has broken my site tho - I removed all CSS customisations and it's no good. What do I do?
See here too as it is on point re: your issue
http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/suburbia-suddenly-changed-front-page-one-hour-ago?replies=4#post-1062263
So the alternative is I have to block both text and featured images so I lose the flexibility the theme once had?
I've just tried the CSS fix above, it completely screws my home page which previously happily displayed EITHER the text, or the featured image, if I supplied one.
How can I get back to the previous model? Otherwise I'm seriously seriously annoyed at having to abandon the Suburbia theme.
This blog: http://hertshps.com/news/
Is also now broken, I invested many hours of effort in this - surely you can offer an option for backward compatibility and not summarily break the theme to suit yourselves?
I've been a big support of WordPress, but this is a really annoying backward step. Why not create a new version of Suburbia and let the rest of us remain as we are?
I'm so sorry your blogs were negatively affected by this unannounced theme improvement. I've flagged this thread for a response from Staff.
Why not create a new version of Suburbia and let the rest of us remain as we are?
That's a good question. Why Staff would respond to a minority of unhappy people and do their bidding, without even consulting with the silent majority who are presumably happily using the theme as is? That isn't logical.
It's a fiasco - surely someone should have proposed this to users of Suburbia and checked on the impact - it's such a big change, without any sensible change control or consultation.
The blog I've mentioned above is my professional site making me look stupid to my customers, and the Hardy Plant Society site only went live for members in August and looks just fine where there is an image, and previously also looked fine with text. Mr IamTakashi proudly announced the change, but did anyone really look to see what people were doing with Suburbia?
This is a disaster, if it isn't resolved adequately then I'll have to rethink my use of WordPress, I can't have my efforts undermined in such a thoughtless way. Backward compatibility is something everyone who uses software needs to be given, why not Suburbia 2013, and leave the original theme along.
It's really bad - the theme was fine as-was. I'm tired from a long trip, this is depressing.
Please hang in there. At the very least I assume Themes Staff will fix your CSS editing for you as quickly as they can. It would be an affront for them to expect you to fix it, as you are paying customer who did not create this issue - they did.
I've contacted Mr Irie here: http://takashiirie.com/contact/
And asked him to read this dialogue. I'll go to bed now.
@theotcspace,
Thanks for your feedback and I'm sorry to hear your blogs were negatively affected by this change.
The reason for this change was on the link timethief pasted above. Another reason we made this change was to intend to help new Suburbia users to get the best look of the theme with minimum effort by providing visual guidance. We discussed about this changes prior to implement and we believe this change is best interest of Suburbia users in a long term. However, it is hard and takes time to make everyone's wishes come true and I'm sorry this wasn't something you wished for.
By looking at Google cached of hertshps.com/news, I assume all you want is a way to hide the placeholders. I've released a minor update so that you can hide easily the placeholder with CSS.
theotcspace
iamtakashi.grid .attachment-thumbnail-placeholder {
display: none;
}Hope it clarifies a bit more about why we implemented the change, and the CSS snippet helps your blogs to back how they used be.
Thank you.
Dear Mr Irie, can you point me to the place where you published the results of your discussions with Suburbia users prior to this change? Did it involve a survey at all? Did I miss out on that discussion?
Your fix above works, thank goodness, but for anyone else, this means to get back to the old behaviour you have to pay for the CSS upgrade, which means I won't be using Suburbia any more, as it adds an unnecessary cost.
I think I'll have to reconsider using WordPress if backward compatibility is broken so easily and without me having any control over a key asset, the Theme.
Any decent producer of software makes sure the impact of design changes is considered beforehand, that impacted users (such as me) get some prior warning of the change, and are given an easy option to opt-in or out of this fundamental change.
So far I have proselytised to people about the goodness of WordPress, now that belief is undermined. I was going to roll out the HertsHPS site to other groups around the UK, on the assumption it was stable, and that non-technical users could maintain their site. Your CSS change has undone that intention.
This is not a good outcome and shows your firm in a poor light - at least consider a form of version control for themes - leave Suburbia V1 alone, and launch V2 so users have a choice.
Overall this is not a good outcome at all. Your comment above doesn't clarify why you made the change at all - it isn't back up by any background on the 'discussion' process, nor any survey results on who voted for this change.
Bill.
@theotcspace,
Thanks for your feedback.
I should've made it clear but I meant "we" as the theme team and the discussion was internally took place therefore I'm afraid it's not available for public.
I've tried my best to explain why we did and I'm sorry you feel this way but we are going to keep maintaining and iterating our themes as needed, and the changes won't be always announced, unfortunately. We are trying to make our themes as best as they can be but if you need to have complete contorl of themes you use, I'd suggest you to move on to self-hosted WordPress blogs so that no one touches your themes. If you need more information about the difference between them, here is the page that explains.
So that's even better - you provide a product for public use, change it without consulting the users, then suggest that they shouldn't rely on this product and if it breaks, go away roll your own. Nice.
This is the worst possible advertisement for WordPress and it's approach to customers. I'm really not feeling any recognition of the need for change control or versioning.
Surely this isn't the right way to behave for WordPress?
Hi @theotcspace,
WordPress.com theme team tries their best to accommodate for everyone but there are limitations for what they can do because of the volume of the users for each theme. Please understand that those decisions can sometimes negatively affect a small group of users in order to fix a larger issue, although it is not our intention to change anyone's blog.
We (Happiness Engineers and Theme Wranglers) are happy to help and provide solution if you find these changes undesirable.
Let us know if there is anything else we can help you with.
A Happiness Engineer would put in version control so users remain Happy and not sad. Kindness doesn't make me any happier that this policy of making arbitrary changes without offering opt-in or out, won't happen again.
Please: Offer versions of Themes, so those who want change can take it, and those that don't, don't. Allow a user to 'lock' their theme from unwanted change, surely that can't be hard.
With a large population of users, surely a change control solution is vital?
I'm thinking you should drop the 'happiness' in the title if you can't provide better control over change to subscribers.
I'm now an Unhappiness Investigator, I will see what other blogging sites offer.
@theotcspace,
I do understand your frustation for system-wide changes that we make. However, this is something we can't avoid in order to run WordPress.com hosted blog system and offer shared themes.
As I have mentioned, we will be here to help in case anything unexpected happens to your theme because of these changes.
If you need full control of themes, I suggest looking into hosting your site on WordPress.org. We offer documentation and are glad to answer any question you may have regarding the process.
Thank you for your patience and we are really sorry about the changes that affected your site.
Yes, same answer as before, you can't rely on the Themes to remain unchanged, so go away and run it yourself. Poor.
This topic has been closed to new replies.
naokomc