juggledad

sounds like a issue with revslider. If it goes away when you disable it you will know.

It might be a conflict with another plugin or the theme so you could try disabling ALL plugins then enable revslider and see if it works.
If it doesn’t then swap themes and see if it works.
If it does work with th eoriginal theme, enable the other plugins one at a time till you hit a conflict. Then you can report it to the two plugin developers.

you don’t have a child theme of Publications do you?
It might be possible to delete any rows in the database that the theme added, but the theme code doesn’t change with the options. After all, this theme doesn’t have many options. But if you want to try
step 1: backup the database

let me know when you have done that and I’ll tell you the next step.

your site just shows a ‘Coming soon’ page

what happens when you disable ALL your plugins?

I want to have my background image located at http://www.someplace.com/someimage.jpg

How do I get WordPress to do that?

The background image location is a fuction of the theme customizer, It points to the image you select from the customizer.

You can figure out the location of that image by looking at the source of a page and searching for the line:

<style type=”text/css” id=”custom-background-css”>

the next line will show the location of the image

With this information you can upload a new image to that location with th esame name replacing the existing image. Make sure that the permissions of the new file match the permission of the original file.

There are two ways I know of to disable a plugin outside of the WordPress backend:
1) using FTP, move the plugin’s folder out of the wp-content/plugins folder
OR
2) using filemanager, go into the plugin folder and find the main php module – this is normally the same name as the plugin folder – and rename teh extension from ‘php’ to ‘txt’

and that will disable the plugin.

Take a look at https://codex.wordpress.org/Moving_WordPress