As you may have seen in other posts, we are dropping support for the Aspen Theme. Fortunately, you don’t have to give up on your site design, or start over, to retain all the design flexibility supported by the Aspen theme. We’ve just released a new Aspen to Weaver Xtreme Converter, and added support for Aspen shortcodes to the Weaver Themes Shortcode Compatibility plugin.

While similar in optionphilosophy, Weaver Xtreme is a much different theme than Aspen. The options are quite different – and far more flexible. Many of the classes have different names. The underlying HTML <div> layout is different. Per Page and Per Post settings are not compatible. Using Aspen shortcodes also presents problems.

Well, we’ve provided a total solution that covers 90% or more of converting a Aspen to a Weaver Xtreme site. There are two new free plugins available on the WordPress.org plugin repository:

1. Aspen to Weaver Xtreme – This plugin converts most Aspen settings (and depending on your design, all of them) to use equivalent Weaver Xtreme options. And it produces a report showing settings that require manual conversion due to the differences between the themes, or that simply don’t have an equivalent. The converter will also convert the compatible Per Page and Per Post options. Best of all, these conversions are non-destructive – you can easily revert to the old Aspen design as needed. The converted site won’t look exactly like the old Aspen site, but the settings take advantage of Weaver Xtreme‘s new features, and so you’ll be able to enhance your site without needing to compensate for the conversion process itself.
2. Weaver Themes Shortcode Compatibility – While converting the settings covers most of the upgrade process, if the Aspen site uses many [aspen_xxxx] shortcodes, the process could require even more effort to find all the pages and posts using the shortcodes. The Weaver Themes Shortcode Compatibility plugin solves this by providing support for the basic Aspen shortcodes. This plugin allows you to switch to Weaver Xtreme without this hunt and fix process. And it will work with any WP theme if you need to switch to a completely new theme. It will do the same for the basic Weaver Xtreme shortcodes – you can use them with any WP theme.
   Note: If you prefer, you can manually convert most Aspen shortcodes to equivalent Weaver Xtreme shortcodes manually – directly in the posts and pages that use them. If you don’t use that many, this might be preferable to using another plugin. And if you’ve been using the short version of shortcode names in Aspen, (e.g., [youtube] instead of [[aspen_youtube]]), then most will work as-is with Weaver Xtreme.

Click on the above links to download the plugins directly from the WordPress.org plugin repository.