I’ve been using the Widescreen theme from Graph Paper Press for ten years. It was one of the 7 themes that integrated with Photoshelter. However, the theme isn’t “loved” by GPP anymore with a recent chat agent telling me that it will be withdrawn soon. Ten years ago, the iPhone was just getting started and WordPress sites didn’t have themes that were “responsive” and themes like Widescreen was optimised for computer displays.
Nevertheless, I still like the them and the only thing that was broken was that on smartphones, the hamburger menu didn’t show the menu. I knew it would be a javascript problem but not being a theme, CSS nor javascript expert, I didn’t really want to go down the rabbit-hole of debugging the theme.
So I spun up a WordPress site on Digital Ocean, created a project on Freelancer (formerly Rentacoder), got responses within 30 seconds, and 30 minutes later, Faheem from Karachi fixed the problem. It turns out that the theme used a jQuery plugin called BGIFrame that broke the menu on Safari on iOS devices. Commenting that out and then adding the jQuery manager plugin fixed the issue. Presumably because it adds backwards compatibility with jQuery Migrate.
It took only 30 minutes because Faheem was an expert in both WordPress themes and the ridiculous complexity of browsers caused by the different flavours of Microsoft Explorer, Edge, Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Brave, Opera etc. and the different formats caused by smart devices. Faheem knew which theme file had the offending code pretty much immediately. After getting the login credentials to the test site, he fixed it in 5 minutes. If I had to do it, it would probably be a day. If I paid a programmer that needed to get up to speed and wasn’t experienced in this area? Probably a lot more than $50.
