Updating from old version

[Chris Lowry]

Hey guys.

I run a site for a charity, and they just told me they are having some glitches. I realised they are running a pretty old version of the theme, so tried to update it.

Any recommendations for the best way to update without losing customisation?

I have it in a child theme, but things have changed so much I’ll be needing to do it manually, but when I just updated it, nothing would work: slides weren’t displaying, for example, even though I created a new homepage and set it to a “Home” template.

Chris

[Chris Lowry]

Sorry, here’s a screenshot of how it looked. I tried deleting slides, changing templates, nothing would make them appear right.

In the same way, I couldn’t get a child theme to have its customisations recognised. I did it the old way with @import, and the new way with enqueueing – but neither of them led to css changes overriding the parent them.

I’ve reverted to a backup for now, because I need to make sure it looks okay live, but I’m keen to get it up and running correctly.

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[Bill Robbins]

Hi Chris,

Sorry for the trouble there. The theme went through a substantial rewrite in version 3.0 about three years ago. Looking through the changes that are in the style.css file of the child theme, I would tend to think that most of those would not work in the update out of the box. Lots of the elements are positioned differently from the 1.0 versions of the theme and combining them could give odd results.

Here’s what I would do if I was in your shoes. I would make a sub-folder on your server and install WordPress there. Then install the new version of the theme and use the import/export features in the Tools section of your WordPress dashboard to copy the content from the original site to the new one. Then you could try out the new version and get it straightened out with your changes before taking down the current one. And you get to make these changes where no one will find them until you’re ready to make the switch. But since it’s on a live web server, I can take a look if you run into questions or trouble.

Then when you’re ready, you can move the site to replace the original one. There is an article at http://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/moving-wordpress-moving-your-site-from-a-subdirectory-to-the-root-directory–cms-22848 that can show you how that process works.

Child themes do still work the same. Just make sure the template line in the style.css header matches the folder name of the parent theme. Capitalization will throw that off on some servers but not others.

You can use @import or a function to enqueue the parent theme’s style.css file. Both work just fine.

Let me know if you have any questions or trouble.

Have a great weekend,
Bill

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