Don’t edit the Twenty Ten theme. Instead create a child theme for your customisations. Once your child theme is active, we should be able to help with the customisation.
Thanks for this – I will know for next time. However, I have spent days customising it – is the only way to get it working do it all again as a child theme? The style.css file all looks fine, it’s just not showing on the site.
Try running it through the validator to see if an error in the code is causing the problem:
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
Oh dear. I tried to create a child theme called The First Hour and changed my theme in the dashboard – now I can’t even log in and am getting a fatal error which you can see at http://www.thefirsthour.co.uk
Make a copy of your customised Twenty Ten them theme and then upload a fresh copy of the theme using ftp to wp-content/themes. This why you should never customise the WordPress default theme.
I have done that and have twentyten back in it’s original format, but I still don’t understand how to get my css back. I have read and tried the information on creating a child theme but the css is all from the twenty ten. I do have a backup of all the stuff I did, but don;t really know what to do with it now.
If it’s still not showing after you have uploaded the twenty-ten theme, download your theme via FTP to your local computer. Then delete your theme from the wordpress install. This will force wordpress to reload the original twenty-ten theme and not your modified one.
I had to do this the other day when I was testing a new theme I created for my site.
Have you tried using the toolbox 1.1 template from here? It would be a much better place to start as it is an un-style theme, easily customisable to how you would need it to be. CSS knowledge is a must though.
Oh I nearly forgot, if you have your style.css file you can test it by going to the W3C CSS validator as Sixhours posted earlier (link is in Sixhours post). You will need to use the DIRECT INPUT section as you have it on your local machine, this will show up any problems in the CSS. You probably find you have missed either { } or ; somewhere in the file which can break the CSS code in certain situations.
Hope this helps
Thank for that – I have managed to get the original twentyten back but still stuck as to how to get my (vastly) amended css and all the amendments to the php files I made work again.
Thank you everyone – I have solved the problem. It was in fact a stupid CSS error which I found straight away in the validator. I still need to sort out the issue of having amended the twentyten (which I realise now I shouldn’t have done) but apart from that all is well!
Just a suggestion, if you rename the template in the style.css of your modified CSS, it will change the name of the template. This means you can have your version and the Twenty-Ten version uploaded in your installation. You can then switch between the 2 themes.
Glad you solved your CSS problem.
