WPBandit » The Bandit Blog

How To Properly Install WordPress Themes

Jermaine — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 12:00:56 +0000

Installing a WordPress theme is quite simple using the WordPress dashboard. This post will help you get started whether you are new to WordPress or have an existing site with many posts. Hate reading directions? Jump to the Important section below.

Paranoid

I cannot recall ever losing any data installing a WordPress theme but if you’re the extremely paranoid type I recommend backing up your site. There are many solutions available and I have not used any of them ;-) Pick one, try it out and hope that all goes well – just in case.

Smart

Before installing a new theme it would probably be a good idea to put your site in some kind of maintenance mode. This will show visitors a temporary page while you setup the new theme. All of our themes are powered by our wonderful Feather plugin which includes such an option. How nice of us right? :D

As an alternative two popular plugins are:

Important

The most important thing you must do before installing a new theme is to disable all of your plugins. Sometimes conflicts can occur between plugins and themes breaking the function of the plugin and/or theme. If you have 10+ plugins installed it can be difficult to determine which one is causing the issue.

Work

After you have installed your theme (with all plugins disabled) begin to setup your theme. If your theme includes options be sure that all you plan to use are working as expected.

Activate Plugins

At this point your theme should be almost be ready to launch with the exception of the plugins you plan to use. Activate each plugin one-by-one and test the most important sections of your site. While this may seem tedious it can save a lot of work later.

Pro Tip

Ideally it is beneficial to have a development environment to do testing before uploading the theme to your server. This helps to minimize and eliminate errors that may occur.

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Additional Information: WordPress Codex – Adding New Themes

Freebie PSDs – what would you like to see?

Alexander — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 21:29:22 +0000

Now with the new freebie section up and running, we would love to hear your ideas on what you would like to see there. More buttons? Some random interfaces? Full website designs? Icons? Interface-imitations, such as the Steam UI one? We’re open to all ideas here. The more the better. Leave a comment below if you have some good idea – it will help us.

New year, new look and plenty of new ideas

Alexander — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 18:54:48 +0000

What you see here is the new WPBandit. We decided it was time for a facelift and have added some new sections to the site. In addition we have restructured our workflow.

What’s new?

Other than the completely new design, we have migrated our support forum to the bbPress plugin. Less bridges, more stability and continuous updates for the plugin were some of the key points in that decision. Hopefully the forum will also feel a little bit more “modern” now.

Workflow

Over time our development environment became split with a mixture of SVN and GIT repositories. All of our code has been migrated to git (we’re now using github for everything) which will allow us to create new themes and update existing ones much faster.

Giving back

We felt it was time for us to give back to our awesome supporters, and that is what we will do in the form of freebies! New items will be added to the freebies section as time permits. Most of them will be useful PSD resources – but you can probably expect some neat code examples as well.

So there you go, this is WPB version five – we hope that you like it. If you spot any issues with the new site, please let us know.

Thank you for your support!