Child Theme Breaks Site

  • Resolved sushikishi

    (@sushikishi)


    3 years, 4 months ago

    No matter what method I use to make a child of this theme, the resulting child theme results in a “white screen of death” stating “There’s been a critical error on this website.” Enabling debug in wp-config generates no error messages — I assume the error is critical enough to prevent this from happening.

    My workaround is to upload the theme to <whatever>/bands2, and manually edit the CSS file replacing all ‘bands’ with ‘bands2’. This results in what I want, except obviously it’s not catching any updates to the theme this way, and I don’t know how to manually update a theme without losing my CSS/Customizer changes.

    I’ve tried the following methods to make a child theme:

    1) Plugin: Child Theme Generator. This works with Twenty-TwentyOne without issue
    2) Plugin: Child Theme Configurator. This works with Twenty-TwentyOne without issue
    3) These instructions: https://nickschaeferhoff.com/wordpress-child-theme/

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Theme Author BandsWP

    (@bandswp)

    Let’s give the official child theme a try:

    https://bandswp.com/downloads/bands-child.zip

    Any luck?

    Thread Starter sushikishi

    (@sushikishi)

    Dang, I thought that might have worked, but no luck.

    I have edited the bands2 theme I uploaded, but the default bands theme is there unmodified, and was just updated to 1.0.3. The official child theme doesn’t have a preview image when I look in at the Theme Selection page. When I use the Live Preview, it goes to the White Screen but I can back out and keep using the site. If I actually activate it, I need to FTP in and remove the theme to get back to the site.

    It’s gotta be something like a plugin fouling everything up, when it’s not 3:40AM I’ll go through testing those one-at-a-time, I guess. It really could be anything, but the one thing i’m thinking of that directly affects the layout is a PHP Snippet plugin I’m using that adds something to the footer even if I’m not using a snippet on that page.

    Thread Starter sushikishi

    (@sushikishi)

    After not making much progress, I decided to…check my spam folder. All of the
    emails WordPress was sending me regarding my site errors ended up there. Nice!

    If I use the official Bands Child Theme, previewing it or activating it throws this error:

    An error of type E_COMPILE_ERROR was caused in line 286 of the file /var/www/html/wp-content/themes/bands/functions.php. Error message: require_once(): Failed opening required '/var/www/html/wp-content/themes/bands-child/plugins/plugin-activation.php' (include_path='.:/usr/share/php')

    I downloaded the /plugins/ directory from the parent theme and uploaded it to the child theme folder, and everything seems to be working as intended now. I would have e-mailed support, but I think the issue is fixed now, and someone else might run into the same issue later.

    Theme Author BandsWP

    (@bandswp)

    Thanks for the update! I’m glad you got it sorted, but this is something I’ll need to fix officially as well.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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