Basic upgrade question

madaa
(@madaa)

14 years, 4 months ago

Hi All,

I have a newbie question. I recently upgraded from ver 3.2.1 and I got an error message revolving around the new “add_help_tab” feature. Luckily, I solved it by coping the new code from twentyeleven theme-options.php.

My question is how does one suppose to upgrade the site smoothly when his theme is based of twentyeleven version x with bunch of modifications and the upgrade has version y with new features/changes required by the new core files. It looks to me like an impossible mission because you need to re-implement all your changes in the new theme. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

Thank you in advance,
-A

Viewing 10 replies - 1 through 10 (of 10 total)

Pothi Kalimuthu
(@pothi)

14 years, 4 months ago

Hi,

You don’t have to re-implement those changes. My site is a modified version of twentyeleven too. But, I have made all the modifications only after creating a child theme.

Thread Starter madaa
(@madaa)

14 years, 4 months ago

thanks, but what if I have to modify theme files like content-aside.php, the parent theme would not be accessible any more, right?

Pothi Kalimuthu
(@pothi)

14 years, 4 months ago

There are a few things that override the parent theme and the others are just added to the parent theme. Either way, the parent theme would still be accessible.

Pioneer Web Design
(@swansonphotos)

14 years, 4 months ago

It may also be worthy to note that the best manner of keeping customized wp-contents folder files, is to manually update and only upload the other folders. First, deactivate your plugins, switch to default theme (or some other basic theme that is known to work with the current version you are updating to), then do the uploads…activate your theme, test…activate plugins one at a time, test…one does not have to rely on the auto-update feature (and I suggest not to!).

Of course, and most importantly, always have a full backup done just before upgrading including your MySQL Database! – If something breaks, you can restore from backup right away and be back running.

Thread Starter madaa
(@madaa)

14 years, 4 months ago

Thanks guys, I appreciate you taking the time to answer my questions but I still don’t see the benefit of upgrading wp. I read about the child theme but still don’t understand how can you enjoy all new features of the upgrade. Let’s say your child theme was heavily customised and it relies on functions from the parent theme and wp core functions. Once you upgrade some of those functions will be gone/deprecated and it’ll screw up your child theme. Now you have to go figure the source of all your issues. Does this make sense? I understand that the parent theme stays intact but its a new version now where your child theme was overriding/adding to a previous version of that parent theme. The issue I see is that you will not enjoy any new features or even worse, bugs will appear cause your version of the theme is older. Do I have to manually go through every file I override in my child theme and Add/Change/Remove modules to make it work like the new parent them?

Moderator Jan Dembowski
(@jdembowski)

Forum Moderator and Brute Squad

14 years, 4 months ago

I still don’t see the benefit of upgrading wp.

Do it to save yourself support problems down the road.

The WordPress software is continuing to evolve and finding support here is easier if you are running the current version.

As in other threads, you’ve just modified that one theme. That’s not too bad and try the advice here to get updated while preserving your theme changes.

Chip Bennett
(@chipbennett)

14 years, 4 months ago

Really, there are a few options:

1) Use a Theme that someone else maintains, and rely on the developer to make Theme improvements. (This includes using core-bundled Themes, such as Twenty Eleven.)

2) Modify a Theme, via Child Theme, and maintain only your Child Theme, while relying on the Parent Theme developer to make Theme improvements.

3) Fork a Theme, by modifying it directly, and then taking ownership of any future Theme improvements

4) Creating your own Theme from scratch, and maintaining it.

Pick whichever option suits your needs – but understand the impact of each decision.

You chose to modify Twenty Eleven directly, and are now concerned with maintaining changes to the Theme yourself. Okay, well… that really doesn’t work.

If you’re not comfortable with maintaining Theme improvements, then you should limit yourself to options 1 and 2. Thus, if you need to make changes to the Theme, but are not comfortable maintaining the entire Theme, you are left with option 2: use a Child Theme.

More often than not, a Child Theme is nothing more than CSS changes. Next most likely change is adding custom page templates, or customizing Theme template files.

The least likely change involves modifications in the functions.php file. If you don’t have to make functional changes, your Child Theme doesn’t even need to include functions.php. In such case, you have little to worry about when updating the Parent Theme.

xCalculator
(@xcalculator)

14 years, 4 months ago

Ok. Reposted that in a new thread. Ok, here’s a theme upgrade related Q. What’s the diff between twenty eleven v1.2 and v1.3? I can’t find documentation on “what’s new in twenty eleven”.

Moderator Jan Dembowski
(@jdembowski)

Forum Moderator and Brute Squad

14 years, 4 months ago

xCalculator? You really should post a new thread, this one is a different topic.

xCalculator
(@xcalculator)

14 years, 4 months ago

Sorry bout that. Thought this was general twenty eleven theme feedback.