Fixmate theme shows demo content on every Homepage selected in Customizer. Cannot select another page as Home.

[radtechgh]

Context and steps to reproduce

Site shows demo content page. Cannot change homepage in Customizer. Every page chosen shows the same demo page.

1. Simple site.
2. Activate Fixmate theme.
3. go to Appearance -> Customize, Homepage settings.
4. Change to Static page.
5. Select a published page...demo content shows.
6. Select another published page from static pages, demo content still shows.
7. browse to live homepage, demo content shows.

Site owner impact

Fewer than 20% of the total website/platform users

Severity

Critical

What other impact(s) does this issue have?

No response

If a workaround is available, please outline it here.

No workaround yet discovered.

Platform

Simple

[radtechgh]

initial site issue: 9357771-zen

[github-actions]

Support References

This comment is automatically generated. Please do not edit it.

• 9357771-zen

[Robertght]

📌 REPRODUCTION RESULTS

• Tested on Simple – Replicated
• Tested on Atomic – Could Not Replicate

📌 FINDINGS/SCREENSHOTS/VIDEO

• I could replicate this only on Simple sites, but the weird bit is that we're showing the "Customize" menu option and only on the Simple sites. I also asked here: p1738338188145499-slack-C0160HSMDQV

📌 ACTIONS

• Triaged
• Leaving this as High as it's creating a weird experience.

[alaczek]

This is because Fixmate has front-page.html template, which takes precedence. This is its description in the Editor:
"Displays your site's homepage, whether it is set to display latest posts or a static page. The Front Page template takes precedence over all templates."

I don't think this is related to Customizer specifically - Customizer only surfaces the homepage settings from Settings > Reading. It's also not a theme-specific issue - any block theme with Front Page template will have it.

This is a long-standing, and so far not fixed issue of how we implement template hierarchy in themes (and how it works in WordPress in general - the front-page.html template is too powerful). Here's some more context and previous discussion: pNEWy-fFV-p2

All of this to say, it's a known issue, it's not being actively worked on atm (as far as I know), and we don't have a fix for this.

The workaround that we could offer would be to edit the Front Page template, copy over the regular page template content, and set up the Query block to display a specific page. This is the only way I can think of as it bypasses the (useless in this case) global reading settings. This is quite advanced task though, and I don't know if we should suggest it to the customer to do themselves. I could help out with that if you'd like.