To make your updates easier we recommend the following:
- Use custom.css for all design (css) customizations. With custom.css you can customize your css files much much easier. Instead of connecting to your server and updating each file separately you have this one file (accessible from Appearance -> Editor) which you can edit to customize your site. To learn more about custom.css please click here. Our advice is to use custom.css whenever you can. Things like hiding elements can be done both with css and in actual php files. It’s much easier to backup one file (custom.css) compared to several php files.
- Unfortunately not everything can be customized with custom.css, sooner or later you’ll find yourself customizing a php file. We recommend creating a folder on your hard drive and keeping track of each file you customize. That way when it comes time to update you already have all your customized files backed up and ready to go. This folder will also come in handy if (knock on wood) something happens to your site and you lose all your theme files. Stock theme can always be downloaded from the member area, but if you don’t back them up – your customized files could be lost forever.
It’s time to update, what to do now?
- First step before every update is to backup everything! If you haven’t been backing up your customized files (as mentioned earlier) do it now. Also, just to be sure, connect to phpMyAdmin and backup your database. Or course, various backup plugins will come in handy as well. Don’t forget to backup your custom.css file (located in theme root).
- Download the latest version of your theme from member area to your hard drive and extract it.
- Connect to your server and navigate to the /wp-content/themes folder. For help regarding this step please read/watch the following tutorial.
- Now simply overwrite all your theme files with the new (updated) theme. You can also delete the old folder and place the new one. Folder names are (in most cases) the same so it shouldn’t matter which approach you take.
- After everything successfully uploads open the change_log.txt file included inside the theme root folder. That file will contain files that were updated in the latest version. Compare those files with your customized files. Files that aren’t mentioned in the change_log can be uploaded back to the server (replace them with the new/updated files). If however you see that one of the files you customized has been updated do one of these three things:
- Upload the file back to the server without doing anything (not recommended)
- Redo the customization in the new file
- Compare the two files using services like this and see what are the differences. You can then either redo the customization inside the new file or apply the updated code in your customized file.
- Once you upload all your customized files back to the server you are officially done with the update! Congrats!
Troubleshooting a problem?
If you’re experiencing issues with your theme and a staff member tells you to update it please do the following:- Download and upload/overwrite your newly downloaded theme with the one on your server
- Check if the problem you reported went away
- If it did apply your customized files.
- If the problem didn’t go away please do not apply the customized files until you and the staff member clear the issue. It’s much easier for us to troubleshoot a problem if the theme isn’t customized
- Check again for the problem. If the problem reappears then you know that one of your customizations is causing it
