Best way to upgrade

Hi,

Can anyone guide through the best way to upgrade the theme. I’m currently on v4.1 and that’s 4 versions behind. The biggest problem is that I have made changes to many files including the following.
style.css
loop-single.php
td_module_blog.php
td_block_layout.php
td_block_10.php (New block created by me!)
td_block_side.php
td_wordpress_booster.php

and lot more!!!

The ideal and the tedious way would be to manually diff the files and make the changes but that would eat up hell lot of days if not weeks!!! BTW haven’t researched about child themes. Would that be handy?

I would greatly appreciate if someone can help me with this!

Child themes are indeed handy. Christopher recently said he doesn’t use them because of the pagespeed slowdown in CSS importing, if I understood him right, which is valid but it does prevent things like this. If you’re a heavy modifier of files, each update will be painful…

Child themes basically make WP use the version of the file in the child theme rather than the parent theme’s, if one exists. Hence your changes would survive updates.

Also, not all of those files can be modified in a child theme (I believe td_wordpress_booster.php can’t, for example). For those ones, you would have to copy the function in question into your child theme’s functions.php, make your changes, and rename the function. Then either change all references to the function in other files, or it’s a hooked action or filter, unhook the parent functions and hook yours in. (There are a few tutorials out there for this.)

Even if you use a child theme, you would want to watch for updates that affect functions and styles you’ve changed and do your changes over again, but it’s not as big a deal.

A block 10 is also included in the latest update, so you’d want to rename your custom one to avoid it being overwritten.

Heh. I actually skip every couple of updates and then do my list of minor hacks; not really much of a way around it. Also notable is that you don’t have to update unless it’s for a security patch, resolved feature issue, bugfix, new feature, etc.

Usually what I do, vs using child themes, is keep a cheat sheet, much like you are doing in your list above, and then open my cheat folder, and my new version folder side by side, then go through each item and modify the new version for my fixes to keep them.

Tedious, but once you have your site the way you want it, you don’t need to get crazy about “oh no! there’s a new update!” — if your site WORKS, in some cases no reason to update every day. I have a site with Woo Canvas, and I skip every 5 updates until I see a need to do so, or if it fixes some wonky responsive issue. Site works, big whoop if they updated it last week.

Often you can look at the “what is new” summary, and decide if that works for you.

I skipped the 4.22 update, and 4.3 and will update on 4.3.1 of Newspaper. But that’s me.

You can use a child theme, just remember for some CSS and javascript things you may find a gremlin which you cannot track down for any specific reason other than you are basically running two themes at same time.

Another benefit of using ONE main theme, is you can also more readily optimize your wp-config.php file to include direct paths to your folders and know they will always work.

Hi TheMediumUTM/ Christopher,

Thanks a lot for your inputs. I got some good points and will see what best works out for me and will follow that.

Thanks a ton for taking out your time to post the detailed information.