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I’m not a tech person, just someone who had a personal website/journal for years using Weaver II theme. I hadn’t logged in in a while and when I did, I found lots of “fatal errors”. I had to ask my hosting company to help me understand why. They said the them had fatal errors and to contact the “developer”. So here I am. Do I really have to rebuild my entire site with a new theme? Or hire someone to do it?
Please kindly provide a link URL to your site so we can be of more specific help. (Use the ‘Private Reply’ facility below if needed.)
Here is the link to the conversion process in case you want to go the conversion route:
Converting a Weaver II (Pro) or Aspen site to Weaver Xtreme – Weaver Xtreme Guide
That said, you can also just install and activate Weaver Xtreme and redo a fresh customization of the site based on the current needs.
If you want to take your time without disturbing the live site, you can create a staging site in a subfolder, work the details there, then transfer to the live site. WordPress has numerous plugins and sage advice to help on a staging site.
As you are still using Weaver II, your site will not be secure. And depending on the configuration, I’m not even sure if Weaver II will work with the latest versions of WordPress anymore.
I know that the conversion version of Weaver II has been modified to run just well enough to use the converter plugin.
Presently, your old sites may seem to work after a fashion, but that may not last as WordPress and its plugins continue to update.
So if the converter doesn’t work, then the best thing might be just to switch to Weaver Xtreme. All your contents will still be there and retained, so nothing is lost in the process.
The site should still mostly work unless there are embedded short codes or other Weaver II features. The Weaver II to Weaver Xtreme helps with most of that.
But unfortunately, we can now only provide very limited support for the conversion.
Finally, Menus do not automatically transfer. Backup settings files are not compatible as far as I know and so unfortunately, this is likely to require manual changes. To help with that, taking screen captures of your existing menus is recommended, to easily facilitate new ones in Xtreme.
Regards!
Weaver II is VERY VERY old as far as WordPress themes go. It also has been a long time since we updated it.
No doubt the main issues are due to PHP problems. Most hosted WordPress sites have been updated by you or automatically by your host to a recent version (6.7). This version requires a fairly recent version of PHP (preferably version 8. but can run with version 7). Weaver II is NOT compatible with PHP version 7 or 8.
The tools needed to update Weaver II are found at the link provided above. You can end up with a working version of you site, although it might not match exactly in style. But the content should be there (except for the need to manually copy menus.) Whatever you do, this approach will lead to a working site that if not looking exactly the same as your original, will at least resemble it and work. While some software will still work after 15 years, a lot doesn’t. Windows 7 is no longer supported, for example. I doubt anyone can still user or run Microsoft Word 2010.
See the chart on this page: https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/references/php-compatibility-and-wordpress-versions/
My site is
shawnna.org
How should I redo my site so I’m not dependent on themes that appear to come and go?
I’d be willing to pay someone to fix it more or less permanently.
I believe that what you ask for is an impossibility.
Irrespective of which theme you choose on WordPress, the Server on which you host your site will continue to slowly upgrade to the latest PHP version for speed, security and compatibility reasons.
Those changes are also reflected in the WordPress core versions, which in themselves also render plugins, themes and thus websites, insecure and outdated over time. It’s the nature of the game……
Sadly, regular maintenances is a requirement of all websites.
Since your website is on WordPress and thus on a database, all your data is still available, as it is immune to PHP, theme or plugin changes. These elements control there presentation and display of your data, but don’t change it.
Please consider approaching your site Host and asking them to set up a Staging Site for you with PHP 8.3.
I’d suggest you then update WordPress to it’s latest version, and do the same with all plugins.
Then install the Weaver Xtreme Theme, and your website ought to work after a fashion, but will need tweaking to get colors, appearance and menus etc. back to what you want it to look like.
There are many articles available online on how to setup a Staging Site, and that whole areas is beyond the scope of this Forum.
Having done this myself in the past, it is not as daunting at is seems. Certainly, if you set up your own site in the first place, you still have the knowledge to fix what is needing fixed…. which in troth, is not very much.
Regards!
If your host has updated his side of things, you can then simply do all the updates required in your admin panel (WordPress, plugins etc…)
Then install Weaver Xtreme, and activate the theme.
All your data should still be there, and you may have to do some tweaking, but errors should be gone and the site should be functional.
There may be a few themes that will last as long as WordPress – the WP standard thems like 2024 or 2010 or any of them. WP always updates them with each new “official” theme. But I think if you looked at other themes, there would be very very few that existed in 2010 that have been kept up to date. I’m sure there are some, but it would have been impossible to predict that in 2010. Weaver Xtreme is likely to stay compatible for sometime to come as it has some “grandfathered” features that are no longer being accepted by the theme standards. But the plan is to at a minimum keep it compatible with current WP and PHP.
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