Envato Bridge – trying to create a child theme, however…

Newbie alert – please be gentle with me…

Having updated to the latest version of WP, I found that my theme no longer functions the way it should. This is because my version of the theme was now incompatible with the new version of WP (and Visual Composer needed to be re-installed too, although this is a separate issue).

The issue is, I did not want to update to the latest version of the theme, as I have made amendments to the version I’m using that will be lost if I update. So I read up about child themes and this seemed like the right way forward. So I created a new child theme folder and style.css file, switched over via the WP dashboard to the new child theme and it works. Yay!!

However I then got confused about whether I needed to create a function.php file or not (as I do not believe I’ve amended any of the php files) and realised that I needed to copy the full style.css amendments from parent to child before updating the parent. But when I opened the parent style.css file, it said that it was only a placefolder file and that all CSS text amends should be made to the files within the CSS folder (which does exist and is full of CSS files).Now I’m really confused…

So, can you help me?

1. Should I copy the entire CSS folder over from parent to child before updating parent?

2. Do I need to copy any other folders across?

3. If parent style.css is just a placeholder file, then what should I include in the child theme sytle.css file? Do I need code to align the child style.css file with the child CCS folder?

4. Do I need to copy and php files from parent to child before updating the parent?

Thanks in advance for your help!!

(apologies for the long post)