sublunar

I can confirm that worked!

Both the main WP Dashboard and Analytics are displaying post and page views as expected now.

An easy fix.

Thank you!!

welp.

Thanks for nothing

Thank you for your reply.

As far as the theme goes: I am using a custom minimalist theme which I designed from scratch. It uses only the bare minimum php/etc to generate a functional website. I have no other themes installed. If you can tell me what “template conditionals” need to exist, I can work them into my theme. I have a dev/test environment of WordPress installed locally on my machine with which I can test out using the Twenty Twenty-Five theme, etc, but that will take some time for me to get setup since I don’t currently have it as an exact 1:1 mirror of my live site.

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I opened phpmyadmin, went to the SQL tab and entered both commands. I also tried with my website database selected.

Both commands returned the same error until I changed the table name it was referencing to match my database’s naming convention.

The visitors command returned the same number as the amount of visitors displayed in the overview page (which was reset following my deltion/reinstall).

The pages command returned the number 9. I’m not sure what that relates to, though, as I have 17 published pages and 272 published posts.

shahzadmalik69

your solution does add it to the menu successfully, but the menu is being displayed in reverse chronological order.

Do you know how to sort the menu such that the more recent posts are on top instead of the bottom?

I’ve tried all kinds of different sorting methods but nothing seems to affect it.

I’ve tried adding things like: 'orderby' => 'date', in my wp_nav_menu code but nothing seems to affect the actual order of the menu items

That works!

Only issue is that it adds it to the bottom of the menu, but everything is in reverse chronological order. So it just needs to be sorted in the opposite order as displayed.

Do you know where I would add the sort (or rsort) command into the code?

THANK YOU for the help! I was not going to figure that out on my own. Still a noob but trying to learn.

I found about 10 themes that are the most “sorta close-ish” to what I want.

I found that *some* of them have different editing options available. With *some* of them, I was locked into this absurd/limited built in editor which is among the worst I’ve experienced. Truly a terrible editor. And a terribly inconsistent experience across the board. Very frustrating. With *some* other themes, though, I was able to get into the CSS/files directly. Which was great! FINALLY I’m in!

Or so I thought.

But I soon discovered that **none of the changes I made to the files directly had ANY impact on the page**. I thought I was going crazy. I kept making absurd color changes, refreshing, changing CSS again, nothing changed.

I walked away after several more hours, extremely frustrated. Another day wasted on this. I came back and found that all the changes I made are now applied. And even after DELETING the theme and re-adding, the absurd color changes and other settings are STILL THERE. Oh my god.

I decided to try making a child theme as I’ve seen frequent warnings/references to. I found that the official **wordpress documentation on the process of creating a child theme apparently has errors in it**.

I thought I was going crazy again. I googled around, found some unofficial documentation and learned how to create a child theme correctly. So I did that only to find out that the CSS from the previously deleted theme is STILL THERE.

I can’t believe how *bad of an experience* this has been for a wordpress noob, even though I have decent HTML/CSS abilities, to simply spin up a basic barebones blog site using wordpress. This has been PAINFUL and I now have to figure out how to wipe out all the settings from before. I’m STILL not even at the point where I have functional access to the css of a theme in order to BEGIN, finally, editing it to my taste.

I guess the next step is to figure out how to set up VS Code to make these edits on my local machine so I don’t have to deal with the hell that is the online version of wordpress editing. I’m astonished at how unpleasant and frustrating this experience has been in the comparatively short time I’ve been here. I mean, damn. I thought wordpress was the thing everyone uses these days. I didn’t think I’d need to invest dozens of hours learning a whole new proprietary methodology just to spin up a classic style of blog.

In contrast, in blogger you can spin up a blog in a variety of different themes in about 30 seconds. You can access the HTML/CSS directly and the changes you make are applied instantly. Done in mere minutes with no deep diving proprietary documentation for basic tasks.

Anyway, that’s my rant. I can see that there’s no easy solution to what on the surface should be the easiest thing possible (ie “How to manually edit various theme/layout to a default classic blogger style”) and therefore I won’t be getting anything along the lines of “yeah that’s simple bro, you just go in and select basic blog and open the editor and you’re golden”. So feel free to archive this request in the wordpress noob complaints or whatever.

Well.. So far it seems the theme “Iconic One” is the closest to the default, classic blog style. And I figured out how to only display the most recent post as the main page. So I guess that’s progress..

But holy hell it has taken so much effort just to get to a barebones classic style blog theme. The editors here are such a pain and their functionality seems to change completely depending on the type of theme you’re testing out. Tutorials even a few months old are apparently obsolete. Menus changing, things missing, etc.

I’ve spent basically the entire day now and I’m only just at a *starting point* for which there is much work to do, just to get the theme to look like my old theme. I’m working backwards and losing all the work I put into the design via my own HTML CSS. It’s honestly impressive how klunky and tedious wordpress is when I could whip up the same result in less time/effort with simple HTML/CSS, especially considering I already designed said HTML/CSS.

In my googling, I’ve seen a TON of requests for this same type of thing, namely, a stripped down/classic blog theme. It’s wild that wordpress makes this whole process such an unpleasant chore.

At this point, I’m still not yet sure if I’ll get it working how I want it and all I’m asking for is the bare minimum from a wordpress theme. This has not been a fun experience.

On top of all that, it seems we are at the mercy of the theme itself in terms of possible future updates or functionality breaking so all the work I put into modifying any given theme could be wasted if wordpress down the line decides it’s no longer compatible etc. ugh.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 3 months ago by sublunar.
• This reply was modified 1 year, 3 months ago by sublunar.
• This reply was modified 1 year, 3 months ago by sublunar.

EDIT: I wrote/posted the below just before you posted the above comment. Reading that comment now.
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I suppose my title/question is a little open-ended.

I simply want the ability to edit a barebones minimalist theme from which I can accomplish the classic blogger layout of my established site.

The themes I’ve tried all seem limited by basic visual editors… except in one of them I was able to click around enough to get to a page where I could edit the css files individually. But it seems like the menus/editing options are all over the place/inconsistent depending on which theme I’m using. Quite frustrating.

I just want to build a classic blog, from scratch if needed, based on the style/theme I’ve already painstakingly developed elsewhere.

It should be easy to do this. A classic blog theme should be like the default starting point.

Sigh.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 3 months ago by sublunar.