I’m a fairly new user of wordpress.org. I have a wordpress.com site using the Confit theme and wish to transfer it to .org.
I exported the site from .com and into imported to .org successfully, only to find that .org did not offer the Confit theme.
I have since downloaded the directory for the Confit theme from here: https://wpcom-themes.svn.automattic.com/ and saved it in the wp-content/themes/confit.
The Confit theme option appears normally in the installed themes section of the .org suite, alongside twenty eleven and twenty twelve preinstalled themes. However, when trying to apply the theme to the site, the progress bar gets half way before the whole thing turns blank, no matter what address within the site I try and visit. I can no longer access the admin page to change the theme back.
As a result, I wiped the databases on the domain, deleted and reinstalled wordpress on the site etc. Again the site works fine until I try to apply the theme. The last time, I have tried to preview the theme before applying it and, unsurprisingly, the preview is blank – no side bar or anything.
Can anyone suggest what I might have done wrong when installing the theme?
Cheers,
Tom.
WordPress.com has now made the theme downloadable via a ZIP file from the theme’s page at: http://theme.wordpress.com/themes/confit/
After installing the theme from within your dashboard, it will then show a message asking if you also want to install their “WordPress.com Theme Updates” plugin.
Yesterday in wordcamp Jerusalem I asked someone from Automattic (Yoav Farhi) about this. His answer was that the themes from the wordpress.com SVN are supposed to work on wordpress.org sites and if you discover bugs on them you can report and they will fix it. Problem is that they don’t have any mechanism or reporting bugs and no one dedicated to handle it.
My suggestion is that you should go to the wordpress.com forums and try to ask over there.
Getting the theme from https://wpcom-themes.svn.automattic.com/ is right way to get any theme used on WordPress.com. I’ve done it several times and never had any problems.
It may be that your download was incomplete and you don’t have all the files included in the theme.
Sure, you can svn the theme. But there will be some differences between running it on .com and self-hosted. You need to enable debugging http://codex.wordpress.org/Debugging_in_WordPress and see what’s wrong.
I’ve svn’d many themes from .com and the differences vary. You will need to debug and learn some php to remove functions that .com uses and are not going to wok self-hosted.
And if you white screen, there’s absolutely no need to wipe the install and start over. Simply use FTP to delete or rename the problem theme and then WP will default to twentyeleven.