My WordPress install can't see this uploaded child theme

  • Resolved chudy_michef

    (@chudy_michef)


    8 years, 10 months ago

    I recently created a child theme of the brilliant Inkblot theme and got it running offline on MAMP. I then uploaded both it and Inkblot to my WordPress site but couldn’t activate this child theme because it didn’t show up on the Manage Themes page. I searched this forum for advice, found that many, many people had encountered problems getting uploaded themes to appear, and tried everything that seemed to have worked for other people (more on which below) but to no avail. I contacted the helpdesk at my hosting service, who said they couldn’t help but the problem was probably with my CSS or PHP files. However, I have no clue what this problem can be because I also contacted the developer of the parent theme, who (after making some helpful suggestions that didn’t actually solve my problem) got my child theme running on his dev box with no problems whatsoever. (On the other hand, the parent theme does appear, so there is clearly something different about my theme.)

    Here are my answers to questions I expect you may have (based on my reading of other threads on the non-appearing theme problem):

    1. Is there a hyphen in the theme name? No, it’s a single word
    2. Can I see the theme files using my FTP program? Yes
    3. Are the files nested in an extra layer of folders? No
    4. Can I navigate to the style.css file in my browser (at http://[my url]/wp-content/themes/[my child theme]/style.css)? Yes
    5. Am I using WordPress multisite? No
    6. Have I tried changing the permissions? Yes: the files are 644, I’ve tried 755 and 777 for the folder, and I even tried 777 for style.css
    7. Does it work offline? Yes, I got it working without problems on my offline MAMP stack
    8. Has anybody else got it to work? Yes, the developer of the parent theme got it to work on his dev box without problems
    9. Do other themes work on my WordPress site? Yes, including the parent theme, Inkblot
    10. Am I using the latest version of WordPress? Yes, 4.2.2

    So I have three things to say.

    1. Help me please!
    2. Given that so many people have problems with themes not appearing, does anyone know why is there no debugging support (e.g. error messages)?
    3. mgsisk (the developer of the Inkblot theme and the Webcomic plugin) is awesome

    If anyone can offer any suggestions I will be really grateful.

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  • Thread Starter chudy_michef

    (@chudy_michef)

    8 years, 10 months ago

    I found the answer to my problem. The keyword here is ‘MAMP’!

    My problem was that I had capitalised the name of the parent theme in the header of the child theme’s style.css file (i.e. I put Template: Inkblot instead of Template: inkblot). This hard-to-spot error made no difference at all when running the site offline on MAMP, because at the bottom of a MAMP stack is Mac OSX, whose file system is case-insensitive by default. However, my actual website runs on a LAMP stack, at the bottom of which is Linux, whose file system is case-sensitive by default.

    I guess the moral of the story is:

    1. Test your site on a setup that is as similar as possible to the one that it will actually be running on (if necessary, using an emulator), and…
    2. The usual WordPress behaviour of failing silently without giving any indication of what went wrong makes it incredibly hard to spot tiny errors (it seems to me that it would be more helpful e.g. to make ‘broken’ themes appear on the ‘Manage Themes’ page with the ‘Activate’ button greyed out and a warning such as ‘Parent theme not found’ or ‘Bad permissions’ instead of acting as if they had never been uploaded in the first place)

    I’ll leave this here in case somebody else is searching for answers to problems that appear when a theme developed with MAMP fails when uploaded to a hosting service. Just one more of the many things to check when a theme doesn’t appear on the Manage Themes page.

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