Did not create child theme before making modifications

  • Sooo being a complete beginner, I made all of my modifications to my storefront theme, went live with my website and then read that any modifications should be made to a child theme otherwise all of my changes will be overwritten if there is a theme update.

    I don’t really know what to do now…

    Is it as simple as creating a child theme and copying everything from the parent theme?

    I’m worried i will lose all of my work *sigh*

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

  • What kind of changes did you make? Changes to the actual files themselves or just CSS changes?

    If the files themselves, what you can do is activate a default theme. Then, rename your modified Storefront directory to something like /storefront-child

    Open up the style.css file in your child theme and change the Theme Name: field to something different

    Then between the /*! and */ at the top of the file add in the Template field

    Template: storefront

    So it would look something like

    /*!
Theme Name:   Storefront Child
[other default stuff here]
Template: storefront
*/

    Then, in your admin dashboard search for the Storefront theme and install it but don’t activate it. You should then be able to activate the child theme you setup.

    • This reply was modified 4 years, 7 months ago by Jarret.
    Thread Starter missy11

    (@missy11)

    @jarretc I will apologise in advance for my lack of understanding, but what do you mean by changes to the ‘files’? I added some CSS changes to change colours, header & footer sizes, etc. The rest of my ‘modifications’ (what I call mods haha) are product uploads, plugins installed and activated, site content, etc.

    Where did you add in the CSS changes? If you added them into Appearance->Customize->Additional CSS then you have nothing to worry about as that is one of the correct methods.

    If you added your CSS into the style.css file, you just need to copy the CSS that you did add into Appearance->Customize->Additional CSS and then remove it from the style.css file.

    Thread Starter missy11

    (@missy11)

    @jarretc Ok, I added it into Appearance->Customize->Additional CSS ?? Where do I go from here in terms of switching to a child theme and having my website appear exactly the same? Thank you so much for your help this far – I honestly am a complete beginner and creating my basic website took me days haha!!

    @missy11 – unless you made changes to the actual files in the theme, you don’t really need to create a child theme. The changes made in ‘Additional CSS’ won’t be overwritten, nor will product uploads, plugins installed and activated, site content, etc.

    Thread Starter missy11

    (@missy11)

    @jricketts4 Thanks so much!!! ?? ??

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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