I’ve logged in and tested it now. These are really disturbing results. Like you described, saving a setting is not working, but not the way you would thing. Typically if a setting is getting reset to the default in a theme built on Runway it would be assumed that the JSON files were overriding the database, but NOPE! What’s happening is even more disturbing that that. The data is NEVER being saved to the database. It’s actually only getting loaded into (what appears to be) some kind of cached data on the server and not actually making it into the real database. That’s why the settings are showing as saved in the reloaded page but if you go to the page again it’s reset. That loaded data was some kind of cached value being sent to WP by the server. Not an actual reflection of what is in your database.
This was most obvious in the Starter Kits page where applying a starter kit wouldn’t even create a backup! That’s not even a Runway feature, it’s a custom theme feature we’ve built just for Vellum so it’s entirely disconnected from the other saved data in the theme and couldn’t be caused by the JSON data files.
My guess is you have a host that’s using some kind of specialized database caching and it’s preventing the data from saving. I can’t even imagine what they’ve done to create this problem but I’ll bet you the cost of this theme if you go to another host (any other host), the theme will work perfect.
My advise, as much as it may seem like a pain to deal with, is to ask for a refund from your host (if you just signed up and they have a policy for this) and try someone else. If you have the same problem on another host, I’ll personally setup a free hosting account for you on my own Parallelus server for the next year. Sometimes these “managed” WP specific hosting services try and do things that make no sense. It’s like they think people using WP are stupid and they add all kinds of additional caching, security and other restrictions on the hosting account which do more harm than good.
Overall, I wouldn’t recommend DreamHost anyway. Not that I have a great reason for it, but they seem more like a budge host than a quality one. Also, avoid GoDaddy at all cost.
Maybe you can ask them if they have any weird data caching features enabled on the hosting account. I’m also fairly confident that if they moved you to a “normal” hosting account and not this managed WP thing the problem would go away. We have hundreds of users running sites on DreamHost and nobody having this issue.
