Word press CE4 to BL4

Backlight 4 & 5 Support
#1

Hy guys, I have been using TTG for many years on a couple of sites, my personal photography www.peterblandford.com and a villa rental site www.begurvillas.com

The second of these just uses the WP-theme TTG CE4 Theme for WordPress 3.1.2 which I applied back in 2017

I have just upgraded to BL4 and I have upgraded my photography site successfully

I should probably upgrade the villa site too in order to future proof it, it would be nice to be able to use LR galleries in blog posts.

It is currently a pure wordpress blog with the CE4 theme

I have installed BL4 onto https://www.begurvillas.com/backlight/ and it seems to work, I can create a test gallery in Lightroom and access it in https://www.begurvillas.com/galleries which is not yet linked to from my site

I would like to upgrade the wordpress theme, maintaining the current look of the site and give my galleries a similar appearance.

I have installed the wordpress theme from “backlight modules”, what do I do next?

#2

In Backlight Settings, under WordPress, make the needed settings so the theme you create will be sent to your WP installation.

If you plan on inserting Backlight galleries into posts via the ‘backlight’ shortcode, enable JSON API

Create a Wordpress theme template.Apply a Backlight page template to it.
Output the new theme to WordPress.
In WordPress, apply the theme.
See the docs for morre
https://backlight.me/docs/

#3

Thanks Rod, is there a way to copy any of the settings from my CE4 theme to the templates?

#4

No, you’ll have to create a new design

#5

OK, thank you

#6

If you have a current Backlight site, to match the WP theme design to the rest of the site, just use the page template that sets the design for the site as the page template for the WP theme.

#7

Getting there on this! I did not have a current backlight site so…

I created a page template and then a wordpress template from that

I exported this to wordpress and it appeared with my themes and I could activate it, and all seemed good.

However any changes to the template do not seem to do anything

If I change the page template, then re-export the wordpress theme, nothing happens on the site

even if I go back to an old theme, delete the new one and then re-export it, it doesn’t seem to work.

Any ideas?

#8

Ignore me, it was the browser cache. It seems that changing the page template automatically feed through to the wordpress theme live.

Very cool!

#9

In the Backlight Settings, under WordPress, there’s aa Export on Save option that will automatically export the theme after any page template changes.

Also be sure to try clearing browser cache. If you have any WordPress caching going on, turn that off for now as well.

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