No, that is not me sneezing the title of this post, it is actually Atahualpa. What is Atahualpa? It is a theme for WordPress. Though saying that is about like saying the Hubble is a telescope. It is a them that allows for complete customization of your theme with a very handy and yet easy to use set of screens that largely gives you options to choose from but allowing for the flexibility to customize in most cases as well. It then takes the information you an input and builds a file or two that are pulled in when the WordPress system needs to display things on the screen, to give yo the theme you have put together. I think I have mentioned it here before and was more than happy about it at the time. Today, I have a slightly different opinion.
The company/group that puts out the theme is called BytesForAll and all in all I have been fairly happy with the product. That was up until the new release of the product. (3.1 from the previous 3.0 which I am running). As stated, the total custom options for building a theme and for doing it so darn quickly is just amazing. It is the biggest reason why I installed it as a test when I was building a them of my own and after playing around with it decided it was so easy and worked so well it would just be dumb to do anything but use it.
At the time I was testing it there was a few rapid fire updates that come along leading up to the 3.0 version. I know that the first version I got stored the files differently then the 3.0 version and so all of my playing around could not be simply imported and exported, which gave me a little bit of concern. There was, however a work around and using that I was still pretty happy and even converted most of the blogs to a custom them using the system.
Along comes version 3.1 however and things are made into a mess. The mess was even worse because of a minor mistake on my part when testing things. Yeah, I pretty much test everything and have a WordPress install for just such purposes. The problem I had though, was when I was loading the new version I was logged in with one browser. When I looked to see how things were I was in a different browser and not logged into the system. Because of that, I was getting a cached page.
So, everything looked fine and I proceeded to do the appropriate backups and updates of the them on all my other various blogs out there in the world. Several hours later, I came back to the blogs to write a post or two that need to be done, finished that, and published. Always one to check out my work to eliminate those glaring horrible mistakes. I immediately noticed a few things wrong, like backgrounds missing and missing favicons. I worked on the favicon, without resolution mind you, for some time before moving on the background. At the background, it began to dawn on me (I know, I am slow sometimes) I had updated Atahualpa – maybe I should check my other blogs.
Sure enough the same issues were present there as well. Missing favicons, missing backgrounds, even missing and replaced header images. Turns out what I installed as an update for the them actually was much more like a replace or even new install. Sure, it did maintain the basic settings that really controlled the CSS, but it wiped out my settings for things like the backgrounds, favicons, and header images. It also reloaded the default header images, which caused them to be picked up in rotation with my own images. Shame on you folks at Atahualpa and BytesForAll for doing such things.
After some fooling with things trying to get things back in order and especially being stumped on getting the favicon settings to work as described, I eventually gave up and rolled back to the previous version of Atahualpa along with my original file sets and settings that were stored from the backup. Now however, I find myself in a quandary going forward. Eventually I know the updates of WordPress will cause something in the current version of Atahualpa to fail. I guess, I am not going to have to go back and code out the custom themes I have developed so easily if I want to keep such things current going forward.
On the plus side though, it will probably load faster with my specific code instead of the loading of the options and then execution as is currently the case.
** – Image is BytesForAll logo.
I just found your post while looking for a solution to loosing my favicons and header images on multiple sites I maintain which use the Atahualpa theme. I completely agree with you: the replacemewnt of custom images by updates to the theme is a major pain.
It’s a pity, because the theme is otherwise very flexible and does exactly what I need. An additional irritation is that if you remove the reference to WordPress and Atahualpa in the footer, it always reappears after a theme-update. This is also a major irritation if one is maintaining multiple sites (and yes, I have paid to become a “Gold Member” of the theme community, which entitles me to remove the reference.
I you have a suggestion on an alternative, similarly powerful theme, I’d be interest to hear it!