When editing a website you can proceed in various ways.
There are expensive tools to edit your site that you can purchase or you can just use Chromium and a text editor.

Generally, you will want to model your changes then commit them.
To start, right click (Ctrl+click on Mac) the context menu contains a link that should say “Inspect Element” or “Inspect”.
That gives you access to the developer tools. In some systems you can also access this by pressing f12.

Make sure to select the element that you are wanting info on in the left panel.

You can make changes to nodes in the left by selecting one and pressing the F2 key.
Changes can also be made here by editing the styles tabs or using the console to enter and test JavaScript.

The changes don’t take effect on refresh though .. unless you copy them into the editor of your website, but that’s a subject for another post.

Good Luck!

This is such a simple thing to set up.

Find the plugin and install it

Navigate to your Admin Dashboard and find Plugins->Add New link in the main menu. Type “Contact Form 7” in the Search bar. Install and activate the plugin.

Setup your contact form in the Contact admin page

Go to the new menu item that will appear after installing the Contact Form 7 plugin and reloading the page. Click on Contact->Add New.

You will find a pre-filled  contact form that you can save and use as is. You need only enter a title. There are many fields you can add here with just the click of a button. You aren’t limited to the given fields here either. You can add images, text and html elements.

Make sure that you have entered the information on the Mail tab correctly.  Click the save button.

There are also many ways to change the messages that are used by changing them in the “Messages” tab.

After your form is saved you can copy the shortcode to any page or post and also to some widgets. It will automatically make a form that should work as you would expect it to. You can find the shortcode to copy in the “Contact->Contact Forms” menu.

In some cases you will experience problems with mail not sending from your site. This is a specialized issue that you may need to seek assistance for. There is a plugin called “Check Email” which will tell you if your email is sending or not.

You can find help with email sending issues and more by leaving a message on the contact page.

Your customization panel is all blank fields.

Face it. Some of them you may have to replace or copy to another customization field.  Themes don’t just have a one to one correspondence. Distinct customization fields are one of the things that make different themes unique! Also, when updating to a more advanced version of the theme you will find that there are so many extra options in the upgrade that the site still doesn’t look the same if your options are imported.  There is just so much extra and allot of work will need to be done to disable or enable options that just weren’t in the original theme.

The only time that importing theme options will work cleanly is when importing into a child theme.

Sometimes you can get some of them back but it takes a little work directly with the database.

To find and fix the old customizations you can follow the following somewhat technical steps.

• 1. Backup your site

First off, one should always perform backups before starting this sort of operation. Backups should be performed on a regular basis anyway so If you don’t already have a method of backing up, checkout this article.  It is highly recommended that you  have a full backup before proceeding.

• 2. Add a plugin to allow access to your database

There are several ways to do this but for the average user we will want to do all the steps with tools found inside wordpress and your usual desktop tools.

Find a plugin in the Add New Plugin page that allows you to gain access to your database. I have found that ARI Adminer works well.

Install the plugin and activate it.

• 3. Find theme_mods_ in your database

You will probably need to refresh the page and then find the “ARI Adminer” menu item and under that click “Run Adminer” and it will give you options. Select “Run Adminer in a new window”.

When the new window opens you should see some menu items on the left that are the tables in your database. Find the table name that ends in “_options” .  The first part before the “_options” could be absolutely anything so don’t get confused and just look for the _options at the end. Click the linkd with _options on the end.

Find and click the links that say “Select Data”->”Search”

And then fill out the fields to look like the images and finally click the blue “Select” button.

The theme settings that you want to migrate will have the name of the Theme you are migrating from in it somewhere. In this case I’m trying to migrate from ember-wp. This means I want to select the edit link next to the line that says “theme_mods_ember-wp”. I will take the resulting text area as shown below and copy it safely to a text file on my computer.

• 4. Install the new theme and activate it

This is probably going to make you temporarily lose your customizations. You might want to consider a maintenance mode plugin for hiding your site while you do the upgrade.

When you have installed and activated your new theme you will be able to look in the _options table again and see that there is a new theme_mods_ entry in the _options table. Follow the previous steps in this page above to find them. Then select the edit button next to the one that has your new theme’s name at the end. In this case I’m upgrading my theme from Ember WP to Ember Pro and so I click the edit link next to “theme_mods_ember-pro”. I will take the text from the previous steps and copy the old customization settings into the newer theme_mods_ text area.

That’s all.

If the theme Customization panel has options that override yours or the names of the options are different then this just won’t work. There is little doubt that some of the extra theme features will need to be temporarily disabled and some things my need to be turned back on.

Much work and time could be required to make the theme match the old theme.  In my case I had to disable some of the frontpage sections and enable others.

If you really want to be careful and make sure it will work then you would want to entirely clone the site using a subdomain of the site. This way you could entirely make the site in a different place and import the newer settings using the above method or by importing the entire site.

Good luck with your site changes.

When you are servicing your website you want to make sure that you can undo those problems in a flash.

I hope that by reading this you will be able to undo accidental changes to your site.

This has the added benefit of having the ability to roll back changes to your site for any other reason, such as being hacked or just wanting things the way they were.

There are actually a few ways to do this but we are going (hopefully) to perform this without the need to access files by ftp or hosting.

We will need a plugin on the site to make a backup of the site files and database.  There are several to choose from. I have found that the simplest to use is Updraft Plus.

Once you are logged into your WordPress Website you can go to the Add New Plugin page and type “backups” in the search bar.

Click on the “Install Now” button and activate the plugin. The rest of this instructional will assume the use of Updraft Plus plugin to do backups and restores.

You can find the backup settings in the Settings menu:

Click the Backup Now button.

A box will popup in the middle of the window that has options. They are for files and database. Make sure they are both checked.

Then click the Backup Now button.

You now have a backup of your site. (If you expected it to be more difficult I’m sorry to disappoint you :))

To restore your site to a previous backup point you can use the same plugin. Simply go to the “Existing Backups” tab in the UpdraftPlus backup menus and click blue “Restore” the button next to the backup you wish to restore.

You will get a popup box like the one below. If you are unsure of any of the options then you should leave them checked. Click the “Restore” button.

You have to wait a moment and then press the “Restore” button again.

That’s it! So easy.

Make sure to download your backups every so often so that you have extra insurance.

Backing up your site is a great way to insure that your site is protected from all kinds of problems and that you can always restore it to a previous version or even migrate a copy of your site somewhere else!

So now that there is nothing to worry about, Relax and enjoy your website.