Search Results for 'child theme'

Yes, except with major WP core and structural changes, this means some things change in the child themes, too.

Also I’m an SEO nut going on 20 years now, so technically a child theme is a CSS redirect every page load, which isn’t a great idea … e.g., load CSS file, but wait, please redirect to the REAL css file now ? Google specifically recommends not doing that.

I usually look at the changelog to see WHAT files change — if it’s just some basic stuff, I can replace those couple of files and be done. For MAJOR upgrades they often have changes to child theme, too.

Been caught by that .. upshot – up to you. I just find it safer to work off main files, and this also removes some gremlins I run into with mod_pagespeed, caching, blah blah.

Having two sets of files in theme folder annoying to me. 🙂

Chris,

To add —

I know you don’t agree – But I think this is where a child theme would help. Instead of reapplying customizations to several files, one would only need to make changes to the files that were updated.

In this current update none of my modified files were updated so a child theme would save me from having to redo everything. I guess I could just FTP a back up of the 10 or so files that weren’t updated.

Is this advisable? I want to make sure things don’t get out of wack.

Due to all the security changes this year in WP, which are ongoing (Akismet identified this week as major security issue, allowing commenters to hack your site!), the best plan is this:

a) make changes to the core theme files (not child theme)
b) keep track of changes made, files, line number, code snippets changed where
c) to update, download new theme version, apply your mods to same files, replace old theme folder with the new version with your replicated mods;
d) if something fails, go back to the backup

Not much TagDiv or anybody can do about ongoing security patches to the Visual Composer plugin — TagDiv doesn’t make that, nor do the theme devs around the world bundling that as groovy cool way to do page layouts.

Sadly, WordPress and all the pieces which fit together have been going through major upheaval this year — and it’s good for security, but seriously you have to get annoyed when the anti-spam tool causes your site to be hacked from comments containing “emojis” which you can’t disable in WP without adding code to the functions.php file. Sheesh.

Anyway– just some feedback. Wasn’t trying to annoy or shoot you down, just some feedback that it’s not just you; WP has been a pain in the arse this year.

I’m counting something like 100+ updates since Spring on some of our sites for WP, Akismet, Yoast, Visual Composer, etc., due to security vulnerabilities. Wild.

Hey Chris,

Don’t apologise for butting in. This is personally my first experience with Child Themes as usually I’d edit the “main” theme as it were, but times before I’d tweaked so much, updates usually broke the site, leaving me to either revert to a previous version, or just to refuse to update the theme entirely.

I may consider your approach as I’ve barely touched this theme due to its many customisation options.

Thanks!

Sorry to butt in, but in my experience this is exactly why I don’t use child themes as they may change over time with major updates and kind of defeats the purpose.

You might consider modifying the “main” theme for customizations, and simply keep track of the files/folder and ‘snippets’ (e.g., line xxx, block of code) in text files, so you can replicate that after an update.

This is what I do, and proves more “consistent” and limits site failure and debugging due to the main/child being out of sync.

With all the functional changes to WP of the past year, this has proven to be even more true.

Sorry, editorial over 🙂

Final update:

Good news. I’ve fixed the problem.

It seems the new version of Newsmag has an updated td_module_single_base.php which is different to the one I’ve been using in the Child Theme. The reason I have that file in the child theme is because I followed this tutorial to hide the ads on a per-post basis:

https://forum.tagdiv.com/topic/function-to-hide-ads-and-function-to-show-author/

I have since copied the updated td_module_single_base.php and re-applied the above code found in the tutorial and things are back to normal.

I understand that this may be a totally incorrect use of the Child Theme, but it works! If you have any advice on how to better implement these changes then please let me know: aaron@n3rdabl3.co.uk

To quickly add to the above:

I received the white-screen when deactivating all of the plugins while the Child Theme was active, not the main theme. The main theme saw no issues when I deactivated all plugins.

Okay,

I forgot to mention that I’m currently using the Child Theme (as we’ve added a few customisations to the footer and functions.php)! I activated the main theme and found that the Featured Images have returned. I also discovered that deactivating all of the plugins (but Visualiser) caused the site to white-screen, so we’re looking into that at the moment.

It seems it’s entirely likely that some code we added to the Child Theme files have conflicted with the Featured Image. We’ll do some digging and update the post accordingly. Alternatively, I could send over the Child Theme files (via the email address you provided) to discuss things in more detail?

Now this link shows up in the source code and it is a 404

http://domainxxxxxxxx/wp-content/themes/Newspaper-child/style.css This file does exist but all the link checkers show it as 404. Any solution for this 404?

I just downloaded the WP only files for Newspaper from Envato and installed it on my website. Then I reverted back to the child theme. I hope that was how I was supposed to do it.

Unfortunately, it did not solve the problem of the posts showing up in the wrong order.

Hi Chris, Ok I can try that out. I forgot to mention that I am using Newspaper 4.1, is last JS composer compatible with it or I need to update to Newspaper 6. Because I use a child theme I am not sure updating to 6 will cause problems.

Hi,

JS composer v4.7.4 provided in your last theme’s update totally broke the layout of my site. I needed to reverse to JS composer v4.2.3, the one I was using so far, to fix the problem. I use a child theme. I understand I need to update for security reasons so how can I resolve this?

Most themes which auto update in WP use either a theme foundry plugin; or can be updated due to being in the WordPress theme repository (e.g., free themes).

Most commercial themes on ThemeForest and commercial plugins don’t have an “auto update” feature, and generally this is a BAD idea — for example, if people had done auto update from NP4 to NP6, and woken up to find their site broken, that would not have been good.

Similarly some plugins may change settings and require workarounds and/or a perfect example is Yoast who “updated” their old wp meta plugin, by disabling it without telling people it would disable it, even though it still worked. Then printed message on screen – “we’ve discontinued this plugin, please upgrade to Yoast SEO” — well, on one site we didn’t want to do that and had to revert to the original meta plugin. Ouch!

Envato tried to build a theme updater for their themes and you can certainly try that. But often it’s best to review the changelog and see what changed so that you don’t wipe your child theme changes if there is major child theme update, or reset your home page if VC changes, etc.

For example an auto updater today might update the entire theme by deleting old folder and any customizations, and upload new one; when only thing changed was Visual Composer update for security issue. So, today only update it the VC plugin which can be done manually via FTP.

So, while it sounds like a good idea — in practice, it’s really not that advisable.

Hope that made sense — not trying to be contrary, just some feedback from using WP for 10 years and having a lot of cock ups from “auto updates” — we turn them ALL off for our sites due to too many site crashes in middle of the night without warning, or CPU spikes crashing entire box due to a bad plugin (e.g., YOAST, often has major bugs every damn dot upgrade then rushes out 3 rounds of “oops” fixes…. seriously… never install that on “new dot upgrade” — it’s a bad bad idea!). 🙂