How to get the default theme back?

[hollie]

I’m @hollie on micro.blog, and I just started using my site again. I explored plug-ins first thing, and found the Arabica theme, and hit “install”. And now there seems to be no way to get the default theme back.

I can’t uninstall it, there’s no uninstall button like the other apps.

If I go to Design, it seems to be telling me there is no custom design while simultaneously showing the Arabica theme, so I’m not sure what to do with that.

If I select “Edit custom themes,” there is nothing there to edit.

Sidenote: I’ve noticed that virtually everyone doing a micro.blog seems to be a tech professional in some capacity - I am emphatically not. I coded HTML in the mid-90s but then moved on to other things, mostly involving yarn and paint. Being adjacent to my software engineer husband isn’t useful here; he works on very different things, so all of this is Greek to me. Like I don’t know what a Hugo engine is, or what a blogging engine is, and I don’t know most of the terms I see in the Help section.

But I really love the format of the micro.blog and I’ve been reading about Indie Web stuff and think it’s super cool, so I’d like to learn. But please forgive the inevitably incredibly dumb questions.

So I saw a help file that seemed to suggest (I don’t know what it was really saying) that I could create a new design and that would somehow make the default one come back? I could have been misreading. Like I said: Greek. So I tried doing that, I created a new theme, named it, and chose that in my Design page. But the design is still Arabica.

I really want Arabica to go away. Next steps?

[gaelicWizard]

You’ll have to choose a different theme from plugins. When you install it, it will replace the existing theme.

The custom theme isn’t a theme; it’s a set of overrides over the top of the selected theme. Leave it at “none” until you want to customize the theme by overriding template files.

[manton]

Hi @hollie, as @gaelicWizard mentioned you can find the “Default” theme under Plug-ins and install that, and it will disable the Arabica theme automatically. We should make this more obvious, with maybe a way to revert back to the default.

I really want Micro.blog to be easier to use for simple theme changes without needing to know what Hugo is. There is a lot of flexibility under-the-hood but we need to do a better job of only exposing the technical plumbing when it’s actually needed. Thanks for the feedback!

[hollie]

Oh well lol - I had actually thought of that, but I couldn’t find a Theme plug-in labeled “Default Theme.”

But this morning I have gone and looked again so I could tell you I didn’t see it, and uh…now I see it. (I’m embarrassed to admit this is also how I lose and then find things around the house.)

Sorry to have wasted your time! Thanks for letting me know!