I’ve known about this problem for quite a while. Ever since a few updates ago when they added the new preview feature, I’ve noticed a few of my themes don’t show up in the preview. I never really worried about it because it obviously doesn’t have any adverse effects on the actual performance of the theme. Now that I’ve been giving my themes away and people have been asking me all kinds of questions, one question I’ve had several times is – why is the preview showing a blank screen?
The answer is actually really weird and simple. I didn’t actually figure this out until yesterday, but the reason the preview is blank – on some themes – is because WordPress doesn’t like the folder the theme is in to have a space in the name. For example my WP Contempo theme does not show a preview. The folder that WP Contempo comes in simply says WP Contempo.
How to fix the problem?
So easy. All you have to do is rename the folder to remove the space. So I changed my WP Contempo folder to WP_Contempo, the preview worked just fine. There’s 2 ways you can do it. If you use something like Dreamweaver, where you can edit files on a server, just navigate to where the theme folder is stored and add the _. Alternatively, you can also redownload the theme, unzip it and rename the folder to add the _, then upload the theme. It won’t matter if you already have the same theme with the space as well.
Now that I know this, I’ll be making sure that all my future releases follow the proper folder naming convention so there won’t be any more problems with the preview.
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Tags: wordpress preview, wordpress tips, Wordpress Troubleshooting, Wordpress Tutorials
Thanks very much for reminding me of this little quirk. It was getting on my nerves a bit.
Dear Sir:
I am newbie. I uploaded SEO pack to the plugin-directory in word press 2.7.1
Also a theme.
I t will work fine till i leave the site and when i come back to the site nothing works. I activate the sites but they will not stay activated.
Can you help me with this or tell me some one that can help me.
Thank you.
Glen Wooters
Thanks for this! And it seems it also doesn’t like it if you have a hyphen (-) in the name of the folder. I was really worried it was caused by how I’d built my theme.
All the best.
Vaughan
My images not showing was caused by theme folder permissions. I use BlueHost and I found that the permissions setting was different from the ones showing image (default and classic). With my FTP client software I changed the permissions to be the same as default theme and ….VALA!!
Thanks for this it helped a lot. Vaughan van Dyk is right, I just figured out that the hyphen doesn’t allow the theme to be previewed. Nice job here!
Yeah, it took me a while to figure it out. One of those little things that doesn’t really matter, but it’s still nice to know the actual reason why it wasn’t working.
Actually, it’s not in naming the folder. I’t that the themes that show a preview have a “screenshot.png” in the folder. Check it out.
Actually, it is. You are talking about something completely different. If you don’t have screenshot.png in the theme folder, the screenshot of the theme won’t appear in the dashboard. It won’t, however, have any effect on whether the theme preview shows up or not. The theme preview uses actual HTML to display a preview, not a static image.