… to bring you news about the Thematic WordPress Theme (which I use as my theme base, and which I know is pretty popular). Something’s wonky with the update they just released a few days ago. Not being a very techy sort, I can’t get much more specific than that, but here’s what happened.
I updated the theme yesterday morning and noticed that doing so got rid of the “Home” tab up there next to “About Me.” Poking around on the theme’s website I was reminded that all I need to do is go into the functions.php file and un-comment a few lines of code that the developers put there for those of us that want the Home tab. So I did. And my blog went blank.
Now, some other wonky stuff happened (my browser seemed to hang when I pressed “save” so I didn’t think that had worked at all, and I was in the middle of feeding my cat and eating breakfast and going to work and stuff) so I’m still not 100% sure that that commented-out portion of code is the culpret, but that’s the order of events. Anyway, I had a post set to auto-publish and it didn’t show up in FriendFeed, so I clicked over to the blog only to discover that it was completely blank.
I emailed Blake at LIShost (who is awesome, by the way), and he said there was a bad line of code that he fixed, and wonder of wonders, my blog came back.
Then I got home from work, fired up my computer, which reloaded all my tabs (one of which was the hung functions.php “save” page), and my blog went blank again. All I can think is that the tab reloaded and saved the morning’s actions again, overwriting Blake’s fix. Though who knows, maybe I’m attributing cause where there is none. Anyway, the wonderful Blake fixed it again.
So the moral of the story is that if you use Thematic, don’t try to get the Home tab back unless you know more about this stuff than I do. Admittedly, knowing more than I do wouldn’t take a whole lot of knowledge, but at the very least you’ll want to edit this stuff NOT in the WordPress interface because as soon as you mess it up, you can’t do anything to fix it because your site goes blank (including the back end). Me? I’m waiting for the next update to the theme before trying any funny business.