Creating a child theme and wordpress update

  • Thank you for any suggestions you have for this. This is my first time working with a child-theme and so I have been scared to update my WordPress for fear that things will get goofed up. I should mention that I made changes to the parent-theme(Elegant Themes-Trim) before I learned about child-themes. Here are my concerns.

    1. I am using a Theme that I have already done some messing around with. I just created a child-theme of it. The Child theme shows up as an available theme but the Live View is blank when I click on it. Is that right?

    2. I have not made any changes to the new child-theme. Does that make a difference?

    3. If I activate it, and something is wrong, will my site go back to the way it was by re-activating the parent?

    4. Should I have any concern about updating WordPress?

    5. From what I understand, as long as I have the child-theme active, the parent can be updated and I will not loose the changes on my site. Does that still apply even through I had made changes to the parent before making a child?

    6. The style.css file that I created in the child only has the header info and the import comand. From a tutorial that I watched, I think that I only put in the changes that I want to make. Until now, I have figured things out by making little changes in the original theme file. Should I copy that into the new file or start doing it as in the tutorial?

    7. Last question… When I work on making changes to the site, do all of these changes go live immediately or is there a way for me to work on it and then send it all out into the world. I want to make big changes but don’t want it visible while I am trying to figure it out.

    Thanks for your suggestions.

    Trinity

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  • Commercial theme are not supported here, so for specific help, you’ll need to ask Elegant Themes. That said, here are some general answers for you:
    1 – a properly set up child theme should look the same as the parent, except that theme options don’t carry over so you need to re-do those in the child theme.

    2 – no

    3 – yes, it should

    4 – always back-up everything before updating and make sure that your theme and plug-ins are up to date and compatible with the new WP version.

    5 – yes, no – you will lose any changes you have made to theme files.

    6 – the best thing is to copy only the changes you’ve made in the CSS into the child theme file

    7 – changes are live; you could consider developing on a copy in a sub-directory or using a “under construction” page if you don’t need the existing site to be visible.

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