Midi__

Hey!

I was actually able to solve it. This is what I did:

1) get the “one-click child theme” plug-in
2) use the plug-in to make the child theme (click on your current theme, there should now be a button that says “child theme,” click it, it will prompt you to enter a name for the child theme and description, then submit, your child theme is now created and the active theme on your site)
3) temporarily assign another theme (not your current theme ex. Twenty-fourteen) to the profile (this is because you cannot delete your old theme yet because the child theme is still referencing the parent them, in this case my older 3.0 theme)
4) delete the older (3.0) parent theme (ADVISORY: when you do this the child theme disappears, it is supposed to do that)
5) upload the new version of your theme
6) activate your child theme again (your child theme should have appeared again due to you putting in a theme with the same name, in this case both MaxBlog 3.0 and Max Blog 4.4 have the same name on WordPress called “Max Blog”)

Once your child theme is activated your new updated theme is active as well and you are done.
DISCLAIMER: in order for this to work your new and old themes have to have the same name.

Lastly, this is for the people that don’t know what child/parent themes are. It’s important to have child themes because they protect all of your customizations. In developer speak this is call “inheritance.” Basically what’s happening is there are two camps. In one camp (the parent camp) you have your entire current theme. This is the layout and functionality of the site, it won’t offer any customizations or stylizations, it’s just the raw layout. In the other camp (the child camp) you basically just have your customizations or stylizations. When you “activate” your child theme it is still referencing (or getting the base layout from) your parent theme. So what does this do for us?

What’s this allows is for all of your child theme (or stylizations) to stay remote from the rest of your theme. That way when you update your parent theme (delete/replace) with your new theme, even if a ton of code is changed in your parent theme, all of you styles stay safe, allowing you to keep an updated version of your site fairly easily.

It took me a while to learn about a lot of this stuff and there isn’t a simple tutorial explaining it all so I thought I’d share.

I did all of this in WordPress, no cPanel or ftp.

Hey bernbe,

Awesome i get most of that. the only thing i don’t understand is the need to get create a new user? I mean why do i need to? i can’t just access if from my current account or is that creating a separate database i can work from?

The only reason i was worried about the appearance stuff is when i am done editing on my sub domain I’m not going to want to have to redo the whole thing you know?

Thanks again.

PS i do have phpmyadmin on my blue host account. we also have cPanel if that helps