(go straight to tldr if your time is precious)
Hello all and thank you for reading this
Im probably a masochist because Im willing to reboot my 2019 old blog. It was a dubious divi with horrible code issues and terrible optimisation/performance. It was travel/culture blog with no monetisation, acting pretty much as a editor showcase. This stuff gave me PTSD. I don't know who said stupid stuff like "blogging on wordpress is as simple as using word" but it certainly isn't true.
Therefore my plan is to recover only the post/text portion from archives and start fresh by republishing posts and edit. I have a domain name and a host. The idea being to update my skills and so on.
Now about the legacy part I asked Chatgpt how to scrape only the text but I think automising the process will bring another cascade of technical frustration. I stopped my blog in 2022 because I realized 60% was about dealing with technical issues and only 40% was about writing. Id like in a ideal world to have a 80% writing and 20% technical issues.
Now this was for the background.
TLDR: Im looking for an easy going/simple travel grid theme (responsive). I don't really have a budget .
Rule 7
No find my theme for me questions
see the Theming WordPress section of the wiki.
Actually, just blogging is simple. Even with Gutenberg its not much different though I’m not a fan of the UI of it. Though, you introduced a heavy page builder. Then didn’t really understand how to use it.
As soon as you go away from “basic” WordPress you add more complexity to doing something simple.
I would start by looking through basic WordPress themes to see if there is something that fits close to what you want. Gutenberg gives some flexibility to design depending on the theme but isn’t nearly as bad as things like Divi and Elementor.
I would avoid ThemeForest. Years ago I would have recommended plugins and themes from there but a lot of stuff seems to be getting dropped months of even a year later. Issues with themes can take a LONG time to get resolved if ever (I’m not talking about the major ones that have been sold there for years like Avada).
But this goes back to adding complexity when you just want to write. If you go with a theme, try to go with something where you can template a layout for a page then its basically fill it in and post (Divi does and did allow that).
You can export your posts using the WordPress import/export tool built-in to WordPress. As for themes, if you’re not looking to get too crazy with design, the current base WordPress theme can be easily customized once you learn about Blocks and the new editor. A LOT has changed since 2019-2022—especially if you were used to Divi. It’s possible when you import content from your old blog, there will be junk shortcodes left over from Divi.