Custom CSS Lost?

  • Resolved stumur

    (@stumur)


    4 years, 1 month ago

    Hello Chris,

    I’m terribly sorry to bother you, but I hope this is a quick answer for you? I use an old WordPress child theme from Thesis called Derby, which these days is so old it throws a hundred php errors. So when I upgrade to the much newer Derby theme, it gets rid of all the PHP errors (happy days!), but my hundreds of hours of custom changes are all gone. If I use your plugin to upgrade to the new site, will it preserve the majority of my changes, or is there no tool out there that will protect all my changes? Even if I upload my old custom.css file to the new upgraded theme, it still looks nothing like my old site, as the site designers changed so much from the old theme, but they’re now defunct, so not answering support calls anymore.

    Thank you SO MUCH for any advice you can give me,
    Best Wishes,
    Stu

    • This topic was modified 4 years, 1 month ago by stumur.

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

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Thread Starter stumur

    (@stumur)

    Is anybody there?

    Plugin Author Chris Jean

    (@chrisjean)

    Unfortunately, I don’t have enough information to give a confident answer. If you made modifications to the theme files (which I assume to be the case), this plugin does nothing to preserve those changes.

    Upgrading a theme with a zip file with this plugin active is no different than deleting the theme’s directory and replacing it with the contents of the zip file. If you are unsure what this means for your site, I recommend using a backup of the site to create a duplicate site somewhere else and testing the upgrade in that test site to know exactly what will happen without breaking the live site.

    If you made modifications to the theme files, there isn’t any tool that will automatically apply your modifications to the new theme. You will likely need to take the new version and manually apply your changes.

    It looks like your site runs Genesis as a parent theme and Derby as a child theme. I assume that the Derby child theme has modifications. The best solution going forward is for there to be a Derby parent theme. That way you can create a child theme of Derby that holds just your modifications. This will allow you to upgrade Derby without losing your changes. The details of how to merge Genesis and Derby to make a Derby parent is technical and beyond the scope of what I’m wanting to provide answers for here.

    Thread Starter stumur

    (@stumur)

    Thanks SO MUCH Chris. I understand most of that. I only ever made changes to the Derby theme, never to the Genesis or WordPress backends, so I had hoped it’d be simply a case of moving my Derby customisations over to the new Derby theme, but it’s difficult finding the hundreds of tweaks all over the place that seem to make the differences. The hiccup for me seems to be in that the Derby developers (Themedy.com) made major changes to the way Derby’s new theme works, so mine looks and works terribly on it now, and as they’re out of business now, they won’t reply to any support requests. But if I stay on the old theme, I get loads of php errors, so I must upgrade it. Never mind – I’ll press on with more wasted time trying to figure out which files I’ve edited over the years! Genuinely, thank you so much again for replying – I know how flat-out you must be. ??

    Best,
    Stu

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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