Peter Cripps Photography

It’s been nearly eight years since I switched my photography blog to WordPress whilst, at the same time, creating an online portfolio. Earlier this year I discovered that the theme I used, called ‘Soho’, was no longer supported (it was a third-party theme, not one managed by Automattic, owners of WordPress). Whilst the site still worked okay I did not like the fact that support was probably not going to be as good and, in theory, the site could stop working if WordPress made any non-retrospectively applicable changes. It was time for a theme update.

First off, I needed to decide which theme to go with. Needless to say quite a number of new themes have been added over the years since my last update. This time I had four criteria to help decide a which one to choose:

1. Must support both blogs and portfolios.
2. Must be free.
3. Preferably be one owned by Automattic.
4. Must have a nice simple and clean look and feel.

The reason I want a free theme, even though my plan allows for paid ones, is that I always think about the time when I may not pay for the site anymore and would presumably lose the paid for theme if I revert to the base WordPress plan.

The reason I wanted an Automattic owned theme was I didn’t want the hassle of dealing with a third party provider for support, Automattic support, at least for paid plans, is really good (more on this later).

Having looked around at the available themes which met the above criteria I went for one called ‘Fewer’.

Previous experience tells me that changing themes does not always go as smoothly as you might like. The underlying CSS always seems to mess around with the look and feel which you don’t expect or want. Was this to be the case this time?

One thing to note with the Fewer theme, as with several other more recent themes, is that it supports something called Full Site Editing or FSE.

FSE builds on the Gutenberg block editor project introduced in 2019. This brought WordPress up to date by making each content element a block allowing you to move these blocks around the editor and change their settings without having to write any HTML or CSS (apart from some of the more complicated things you might want to do).

FSE extends the block editing concept by allowing you to edit things like headers and footers, sidebars, navigation (menus) and more. In theory it should reduce the amount of custom CSS you need to add to fine tune your site. Sounds good, though it is something else you need to learn!

Unfortunately WordPress, on the plan I have, does not allow for a staging environment whereby you can build and test your site before switching to a new one. I was however able to partially replicate a staging environment by creating a completely new free site, selecting the theme I wished to use and building a stripped down version of my site by replicating key pages i.e.

• A Home page.
• A Blog page with a couple of entries.
• A Portfolio page with a single portfolio page.
• An About page.
• A Contact page.

Significantly this allowed me to mess around with how FSE worked and to figure out some of the things I would need to do to my old site once it had migrated to use the new theme I had selected.

Having decided the ‘Fewer’ theme looked like it met my requirements for a refreshed blog and portfolio site I held my breath and hit the ‘activate’ button to install the new theme. This was a one way step because as soon as you transfer from an unsupported theme you cannot go back and reactivate it. It was all or nothing therefore!

Once the migration is done (it only takes a few seconds) you can take a look at the new editing home page. I say new, on a first glance it seems like just the same as the previous home page.

The first thing to notice is that the Home page has been unpublished. To be fair WordPress warn you about this – something to do with moving to the block editor though in my case my previous Home page used the block editor so not sure what that’s about. It’s easier enough just to publish the home page again though.

A more immediate issue is that the menu (now along the top of the page) is not linked properly. In order to fix this you need to go into the new Editor for changing the design of your theme (Appearance -> Editor) then select Navigation. Here you can fix the links to other pages on your site.

The same editor allows you to change templates that are loaded with your theme.

This was where the main faffing around had to be done for me. Although the block editing of page controls is probably a good thing there are a number of idiosyncrasies to get your head around to get things just as you want them.

Getting some of these things right eluded me so I had to resort to getting some online help. This, I have to say is where WordPress excels. The online support is really good in that you can input quite intricate questions and you quickly get back even more detailed answers. I suspect this is all AI generated. For example here’s a query I had about using the search box on my blog.

My query

I have just changed to a new Theme (Fewer) as my previous one (Soho) went out of support. The new theme uses FSE which I am struggling with. I have most things working except searching on a category or a tag. Whenever I tap on either of these from a blog post they return me to the same set of results showing items from my Portfolio. It uses the template 'All Archives' to display the result I believe. I cannot figure out how to change this without messing up display the my Portfolio page. This is the site I am having problems with: https://petercripps.photography.

WordPress response:

I understand you're having issues with category and tag archives displaying portfolio items instead of blog posts after switching to the Fewer theme. Let me help you with this.

The issue is likely related to the All Archives template, which handles both blog post archives (categories/tags) and portfolio archives. Here's how to fix this:
1. Go to your dashboard and navigate to Appearance → Editor
2. Click on "Templates" in the left sidebar
Find and click on the "All Archives" template
3. Look for the Query Loop block that displays your content
4. Click on the Query Loop block to reveal its settings in the right sidebar
5. Under "Post Type", make sure "Post" is selected instead of "Project"

If you want to maintain your portfolio display separately, you can:
1. Create a new template specifically for portfolio archives
2. Use the Portfolio shortcode on a dedicated portfolio page

For your specific case with the Fewer theme, I recommend creating a dedicated portfolio page using the Portfolio shortcode:
[portfolio]

This will ensure your portfolio items display correctly while keeping your blog post categories and tags working as expected.

If you continue to experience issues with this, please let me know and I can provide more specific guidance for your site.

After a few goes at this over a number of issues I managed to get things on my updated site how I wanted them.

Overall I’m happy with this move. The fact I have an up-to-date theme with the latest editing capabilities (i.e. FSE) will hopefully mean I have an easier time with future changes I wish to make.

Although WordPress may not be the simplest blog/portfolio site to use I think it makes up for any shortcomings by it’s value and good online support.

I’ll be sticking with WordPress for a few years to come I think.