Installing custom themes the easy way

‘Custom’ referring to themes that require copying and pasting such as Stacky 5, Stacky 4 and Incontext 2.

Since Tumblr introduced the new customize page just about everyone has encountered an issue, from odd refreshing and theme updating to not resetting a theme’s default settings. The best workaround is to not use the new customize page altogether, Tumblr conveniently kept the old version online, which UT recommends you use instead.

The old version can be accessed here (this will go to the old customize page for your main blog) or by adding ‘-classic’ without the quotes to www.tumblr.com/customize so it looks like www.tumblr.com/customize-classic/[Blog Name].

To install a custom theme using the old customize page, follow these steps:

1. Click ‘Theme’ from the top menu bar and click ‘Enable custom HTML’ (if it’s already enabled then move onto step 2).
2. Select all the code in the box and delete it, paste the HTML for the custom theme into the blog and click ‘Update Preview’ (not ‘Save’), the page should refresh with the new theme, it may look messed up but don’t worry.
3. Click ‘Appearance’ in the menu and click ‘Reset defaults’, the page should refresh again with the default appearance settings for the theme enabled.
4. Customize the theme and/or click ‘Save’ (as soon as you click ‘Save’ the page will redirect to the new customize page, this is ok because the theme should be properly installed and you may customize it from there) or ‘Save + Close’.

The old version of the customize page does not load all javascript so posts won’t stack if the theme is Masonry based, Twitter won’t appear, etc.