I’ve converted one site from Atahualpa to Montezuma, and it took me about three days, but it helped that I had set up another Montezuma site before so I was familiar with how the theme works. I also set up a sandbox site so I could play around with making changes before actually implementing them on the production site. Plus, the way that WordPress makes it easy to switch back & forth between themes, what I did was install Montezuma, make changes to the theme during “off hours” when there would be little traffic (i.e., in the middle of the night), then switch back to Atahualpa when I wasn’t working on Montezuma, until everything was done.
As far as plugins go, I didn’t find anything that I used with Atahualpa that didn’t work on Montezuma, although I did decide to drop a couple of plugins, not because they didn’t work, but because they didn’t fit with how I wanted the re-designed site to look. The one feature of Atahualpa that doesn’t come built-in with Montezuma is the rotating header images, but I was able to mimic that by using a slider plugin called Meta Slider and drop a slider into a widget area that I created in the header (easy to do with Montezuma).
One of the challenges that I found with learning how to use Montezuma is that unlike most themes, including Atahualpa, you don’t get a bunch of option pages where you change the values of different elements. Instead, you have to learn how to use the virtual templates (both Main Templates and Sub Templates) and the virtual CSS files. For example, if you wanted to change the background color of the main menu (menu 1), in Atahualpa you would go to Appearance > Atahualpa Theme Options > Header Area > Menu 1 > Background color and setting the option value to #ffffff. In Montezuma, you would go into the virtual CSS file Appearance > Montezuma Options > CSS Files > menus_menu1.css and make a change to the CSS rule for the #menu1-wrapper selector. This works a lot like the way a traditional web developer works, so it helps if you know some basic HTML and CSS. It’s also helpful to learn how to use a web debugging tool like Firebug or Chrome Developer Tools, although this is true for any theme and not just Montezuma.
The virtual templates and CSS files really allow you to make more changes to the appearance to your site than any other theme, including Atahualpa (plus you get the advantage of responsiveness). Take a look at the showcase thread on the BytesForAll support forum to get an idea as to how customizable the theme is. I’m pretty confident that Montezuma (with some additional plugins) can be configured to look like just about any site out there without resorting to creating a child theme.
Another question about Montezuma.
I have a website created with Mac iWeb (about 50 posts mostly text, images and links, nothing fancy). It’s time to convert it to WP.
I was told to download the html files to FileZilla. Then to use a converter plugin from Stephanie Leary to move the html in bulk to WP. Does anyone have experience on doing this? What will be the known problems moving this to Montezuma?
Convert Post Types:
This is a utility for converting lots of posts or pages to a custom post type (or vice versa). You can limit the conversion to posts in a single category or children of specific page. You can also assign new taxonomy terms, which will be added to the posts’ existing terms.
This plugin is useful for converting many posts at once. If you’d rather do one at a time, use Post Type Switcher instead.
I think you actually want HTML Import 2, also by Stephanie Leary. There shouldn’t be any problems with Montezuma, since it uses the same standard WordPress posts as all other themes. I’m not sure how it would work in your particular case, but it looks like you should have a pretty good understanding of the HTML structure of the pages that you have saved. If you have questions about how to convert your iWeb site, you may want to post them on the plugin’s support page.
Convert Post Types would be used for posts which have already been loaded. You can read about Post Types here.
