Wordpress: Converting a site to the GPEW 2023 Theme

Wordpress: Converting a site to the GPEW 2023 Theme

What is the new theme?
In the few months before the General Election, a new theme for Green Party Wordpress sites was released. This coincided with the removal of the Green Party Visual Editor (BeaverBuilder) Plugin that is being retired. For many sites this has already happened, and for new sites created since the launch of the 2024 General Election, this does not apply as they were put straight onto the new theme, and without the Visual Editor Plugin that has been causing issues with Wordpress sites.

Other terms used in this article:
  1. Green Party Visual Editor / BeaverBuilder: This is a plugin that was added to Wordpress Sites when they were first set up. 
  2. Wordpress Theme: This is a wrapper for the site that tells it how to display certain things. For example, having all subheadings be in white text, with a green background.
  3. Wordpress Block Editor: Wordpress has it's own block editor to let you edit pages. You can type like you would in a normal word document, and then add in special blocks of code using '/'. An example of one of these blocks is a List of Posts that will then show the X most recent posts on your local party site.

How to convert your local party site yourself
To do the conversion yourself, you need to be an Administrator for your local parties website.

First you need to enable the theme. You can do this by going to Dashboard > Appearance > Themes, and then clicking Activate on the GPEW 2023 theme.


Then you need to go to Dashboard > Pages. You can toggle viewing only the pages that are built using the Green Party Visual Editor. Click 'Green Party Visual Editor' to filter to only the pages using it.


For each of these pages, you need to click Edit to attempt to edit the page using the Wordpress Block Editor

When you do so, you will see a screen like this prompting you to instead use Green Party Visual Editor. You should choose Use Standard Editor so that we can convert the page to be editable by the Wordpress Block Editor instead.


When you do so you will receive the following warning. Click OK. 

Once that page is open in the Wordpress Block Editor, click Save to complete the conversion.
You need to do this for each page.

Other changes you need to make:
Converting posts:
It was possible to build Posts for the News page using the visual editor too. You may need to convert these over, however in our experience, these usually require no additional work to keep them looking as they did before.

Fixing breaking changes:
Some modules that were available with the Green Party Visual Editor will display differently in the Wordpress Block Editor and the new theme. You will need to view each page to check, and make some changes to fix this. The most common issue is if a page was using columns (often to create a sidebar of content on the right), then it will now show that content at the bottom of the page under everything else. You can fix this by adding a WP Columns element and dragging in the content.

Updating the Appearance > Customise > Widgets section:
Your site may now show a sidebar with Recent Posts, Archives etc. You can remove this by going to the Widgets section, then clicking Sidebar, and then expanding and clicking delete for each item in the list.

Updating page templates:
Each page can use a different template. The template we advise generally is 'No Sidebar'. This can be set by going to Pages, then for a page click Quick Edit, and update the Page Template for that page.

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