It took me a while to pick the right theme from WordPress’ array of offers. I was on the fence for weeks, but then I finally settled on Apostrophe – a magazine type theme. I liked the orderly way the square tiles appeared on the pages, allowing for optimal viewing of blog posts without any excessive scrolling.

It actually took a great effort to get my head around the various features and how to get the layout just right. This was further compounded, as the difference between Featured and Sticky posts were initially elusive to my novice blogger brain.

I remained calm about my many woes as I knew, I could always return to Apostrophe’s info page written by the theme’s developer, Automattic. However, today I discovered that the Theme has been retired. I was met with below message upon venturing into the info page.  My subsequent order of action: “Arrgh”, panic, contact Happiness Engineers pronto.

It turns out that even though a theme can retire from time to time, you will still be able to use it. The only caveat is that it will no longer be supported or updated by the developer. Thankfully, Apostrophe 2 was available. I guess this is the one they developed to replace Apostrophe. Moving to a similar theme should minimize any transfer issues to format and layout.

Although you are indeed now viewing the ‘new’ theme, the move wasn’t entirely frictionless. Some of the functions in the theme behaved differently. The layout of the Featured and Sticky posts was all messed up, and the chronological order of posts was out of sync. So, I had to go through the setting of each post to ensure that these were set properly. To have a post as featured content, you need to add a tag called ‘featured.’You can actually customise the featured tag via My Sites → Customize → Featured Content, if you prefer a different word to rule above all other tags. The sticky post button is no longer on the tiles in edit mode. It will need to be set via ‘Status’ in the Post Setting’s menu.

Additionally, the CSS that I had added, messed up the overall layout of the theme headings and posts headings. The Happiness Engineer was very helpful, but I decided to just start over with the CSS, as no matter of tinkering with the code appeared to have an effect.

To my fellow novice bloggers, a gentle warning, therefore! Remove your CSS prior to transfer and keep in mind that some features from the original theme may behave differently in the new one.

I must say, though, I am very happy with the new and improved Apostrophe 2. I just hope it stays ‘not retired’ for a while. 🙂