We’ve settled on names for the two official UW WordPress themes we’ll have later this month: UW Theme and UW Theme Lite. This site is running UW Theme Lite, a version of the theme that follows the most basic WordPress theme standards, while applying the UW site header, navigation, typography and footer.
UW Theme Lite is well-suited for class blog sites and other small, simple WordPress sites. It can also be a good choice for developing a child theme where you want the basic UW look and feel but otherwise need to add your own custom theme.
Switching from the “basic” UW theme to UW Theme Lite
UW Theme Lite is the same theme as what was previously called the basic UW theme, just with a different name.
Switching to the new theme
If you have been using the UW basic theme as is, you can switch to the newly named theme by:
- Uploading the new theme to your site
- Switching the theme in the WordPress theme manager
The above steps should preserve your prior theme customizer settings. Once you’ve made the change and verified everything looks okay, you can delete the old uw-madison-160 theme folder.
If using a child theme
If you’ve been using a child theme with the the basic theme (whose folder name was uw-madison-160) you’ll need to modify your child theme’s style.css file so that the value for Template: is now uw-theme-lite instead of uw-madison-160. (After making this change and uploading the uw-theme-lite folder to your site’s themes directory, you may also need to deactivate and activate the theme in the Themes manager in order for the child theme to recognize the new parent theme folder. You can do so by switching to a different theme and then back again.)
If you need assistance in making the theme switch, please email wordpress@umark.wisc.edu
(See documentation about using and contributing to UW Theme Lite.)