So I have a theme that was given to me that I need to install called Roots Version: 6.5.2 by Ben Word…
I installed the theme and uploaded the database etc but I only get the header and not the Body index.Try as I may I cannot get this theme to work.
My question is this …is Sage an offshoot of this previos theme? would installing Sage do the trick?
Hi @xu123
Sage was previously called Roots, and Ben is from the core team. So, what you have here is just an old version of what’s now called Sage.
I don’t know how version 6.5.2 works, sorry I can not help you with that… Maybe updating it to version 8 isn’t that hard, version 9 would be a bit harder as it heavily differs from previous ones.
Thank you so much…I really love this whole Trellis, Bedrock, Wordpress family thing…
It’s super important to know that both Roots and Sage are starter themes, not finished themes themselves, so even if the answer is updating from Roots 6 to Sage, there will be a lot of additional work to re-implement your site’s look and feel on the new starter. They are themes that are meant to be heavily customized and altered, so simply replacing version 6 with version 8 or 9 will not work.
What’s more likely is that you have a PHP error. Have you tried turning on WP_DEBUG?
I actually think updating Sage is the wrong track. Understand that Sage themes look very different in development and when live- all of the dev tools are stripped out when it’s compiled for production, it becomes just like any theme.
If you have inherited a production version of the theme (is there an assets folder? and actually can we see a repo?), chances are you’ll have to debug it as it stands. My guess would be there were fuctions outside the theme (maybe a plugin, maybe a library) which it relied on, but without seeing the files I have no idea. Maybe it just needs you to use categories in a particular way?
Also, as @MWDelaney points out, that’s a very old version of sage, so the info we have is going to be quite mismatched.
Thank you for that I see…Yes the theme I have is very heavily customised…I’m thinking more in terms of upgrading the template for security, compatibility with plugins reasons.
From what you are saying there does not appear to be a progressive update from roots to sage…
In all honesty I cannot see how using this raw “nuts and bolts” template makes a developers job any faster than using any one of the gazillion themes available on a vanilla install.
I find that the themes available for free on WordPress.org or for sale on any number of other sites are necessarily built without a specific use case in mind. They often have many features I won’t use, and the few features I really need aren’t exactly right and require adjustment.
If I build with Sage I can know 1) that it’s built to fullfill exactly the business needs of my client. This means they’re lean, only including the functionality we actually need rather than trying to disable all the unneeded functionality in a retail theme; 2) that it’s built in a way that I can understand and progressively improve upon over time (progressive improvement post launch is a major push at my agency and we feel it’s a good way to keep sites fresh and functional). We find that retail themes are often difficult to expand upon, and when you do, you break the upgrade path.
It’s a matter of personal choice. I would rather have my hands around the whole application (core, plugins, and view layer).
It’s completely up to you if you like Sage or not, but I think you misunderstand the point of it!
Sage isn’t a finished theme, it’s a starter theme. From it you can make a theme exactly as you want, without having to setup all the dev tools and structure. When you’re done, those tools will output a finished theme which you could then sell on themeforest.
For this reason, you generally don’t update a deployed theme using Sage- that’s not how it works. You might rebase/update your development copy, and then recompile the theme. Now you can push that update out to all your clients who use it, or to themeforest, but the packaged final version you sell/deploy isn’t really Sage any more. It was just made with Sage.
I’m sorry to hear you’ve got this situation with an old theme, I recommend using some theme-checker plugins to test its security and compatibility. It sounds like the last dev has kind of screwed you over.