Upgrade destroys entire site

I was slightly too fast with my moping….There is a good workaround for this:

I opened the site with the old theme options open, I placed the new theme in a Firmness105 folder – next to the old one – and tweaked the preview customisation menu’s, copying the options from the old customisation page and then activated the new theme with the settings I copied from old to new. Works like a charm…

This is resolved, as in “workaroundable” is an easy way…

My site is destroyed and I have a child theme running so something is amiss. Could be that as well.

Carlo, can you please help me resolve since I am not seeing too much activity from the developers here? I did not quite follow your instructions.

Thanks,
TWS

Yep, of course. this is what you do:

• Upload the new theme – NOT an update – in the proper place, in Firmness105 or something. You will have 2 themes in your back-end now, both called Firmness.
• Open this new theme in preview mode and open the modify menu.
• In another tab, open your active theme options menu.
• Copy your options from old to new manually. The listorder in the new version is virtually the same, but look well for all the tweaks you made.
• If you are done tweaking the preview theme, activate it and you are done.
• Keep the old theme in place so that you can switch back if you need to check options.

If you are entirely sure the new theme has all the tweaks you copied from the old theme, you can remove the old theme.

Thanks Carlo!

I understand (generally) but I believe my theme may have been automatically updated so I only see the latest (revised Jun 27, 2015) in my file structure? Unless there is somewhere else I should be looking?

But what I don’t understand is that even though I used a child theme, all of my changes are not evident since the update. Primarily, my homepage has defaulted to latin placeholder text and the default theme color, yellow, is back.

Unfortunately my host backed up on 6/28 and I had not backed up the site up to this latest round of changes. It seems all may be lost but I need to understand so I don’t live to repeat it.

Now I did formatting edits last night in customizer but I can only see the changes in the wp dashboard view. When I check live, it is as if I changed nothing. Back to the default yellow etc., which I changed and saved last night. I can see them on dashboard but not live. ??

Sorry for lengthy update. I thought perhaps more information might help to get to the root of the problem.

Thanks again.
TWS

Well, install the old theme – manually directly on the server in the proper wp-folder – next to the new one and switch back to that. It will probably remember your settings in the DB and restore your site.

Then you do the copy-thing in the preview. Save the settings and activate the theme, otherwise they remain invisible. You can always switch back to the old theme; to work in “bursts” until your entirely done and then switch to the new theme permanently.

Any consequences of using a child theme I don’t know. I don’t use that.

Good luck.

Hmm, that sounds good. . .of course I have a copy of the old theme. . .I will just need to sort through the use of the child theme but the premise is the same, manually copy the old customizations from the old to the new. . .assuming the settings are remembered in the DB. . .

Sounds good! Let’s see if I can pull it off!

I will let you know.

Thanks!

In case somebody else using this solution is looking for the previous Firmness version 1.0.4
here is the link:

Firmness 1.0.4

Hope it helps

Sorry for the delayed update. . .family and Holiday festivities found their way into my schedule . .

I successfully loaded the prior version, 1.0.4 and was able to manually pull my customizations and transfer them over to my child theme powered by the new parent, 1.0.5.

I temporarily renamed the new theme, uploaded the old, activated the child via the old theme and retrieved my data. In the backend, I renamed the old theme and gave the new theme the Firmness name again. I then opened the child them via the new parent theme, updated the customizations and saved.

Site is now updated.
Thanks Carlo and Giorgio25b!!

Hope this thread helps someone else.
TWS

You are most welcome…. ??