Changed Theme to Cocoa

The information in this post may be of use to anyone using Safari on a Mac.

You should understand that I started writing this post before it was a post, just something to write to get to the bottom of a problem. And then it turned into a post. Read on…

I had Gutenberg activated on this site with the Rosalie theme – and there were some problems that you can read about if you look at earlier posts.

So I deactivated Gutenberg while the theme authors look into the issues.

Time is moving on so at least for now I changed to the Cocoa theme.

What do you think of it?

It’s made by Elma Studio and they make WordPress themes for self-hosted sites as well as having a couple or three themes here in WP.com.

I have always liked the spaciousness of their themes and now they have a couple of WooCommerce-ready themes.

I am not sure whether those WooCommerce-ready themes are available on WP.com.

If they are, then that’s a reason to try the WP.com Business plan (which allows plugins) as an alternative to self hosting an e-commerce site.

Problems

But, back to what happened when I changed to this Cocoa theme, which was that the Admin panel was back to what it looked like before the invitation to try Gutenberg.

In other words, Gutenberg was nowhere to be seen.

Where had it gone?

Scratches head.

I asked Support and we sent each other screenshots of what they could see in my Admin and what I could see in my Admin.

In the end they activated Gutenberg for me, and  then I could see Gutenberg in the sidebar.

Everything is back to normal?

I thought so, but when I drafted a post, and went to preview it I got this error message:

Oops! That page can’t be found. It looks like nothing was found at this location. Maybe try another search term?

While I was waiting for this to be sorted out, I posted an image – really just to add something to the post to kick it into dropping the page not found message.

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No joy though. I was in Safari, so I logged in on Firefox and that worked OK. So it was a Safari issue. I cleared the cache. No joy.

In the end I had to log out of WP.com and back in again, and then it worked.

At the end of our conversation, Support said that he/she had talked with two users today, and they had almost similar issues with MacBook Pro and MacBook Air and that it It looks like the Safari browser  was stuck with the cache for a while even after (supposedly) clearing the browser cache.

Insert Block Woes

This is a bit later on after every thing got sorted out, and one thing I notice is that the procedure for inserting a block is a bit flaky. Inserting a block means inserting a paragraph or an image or a header between blocks that have already been written.

Sometimes when I click the little plus button at the top of a block, it immediately opens a space to work in.

Other times it brings up the toolbar and invites me to click to add a block before or after (and other options).

And sometimes it does twiddle all. Nothing happens, nada.

This is what the little plus button and the explanatory ‘Insert block’ text look like:

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Overall though, I am getting used to Gutenberg. I can’t say that it is blowing my socks off. It is early days though, and certainly on self-hosted – where there are more blocks available – it’s starting to look appealing.

For example, Editor Blocks has pricing tables, protected content, and this little sweetie which is a horizontal layout block. I can only show you an image of it, but you get the idea – text to the left, image to the right, and a clickable button.

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That’s the kind of thing that would have required a specific theme or a page builder in the past.