Version 1.32 Ruins Site

Before I even go into any detail, my question is actually this: is there any sort of documented resource for the major coding changes from one version of the theme to the next? If so, I need to see it…

I’ve done a lot of modifying to my site after putting together everything using the Sydney Theme v1.31

No custom CSS has been added to the theme itself, only through plugins which allow modification of the header and footer areas so that I can write in certain CSS (or scripts) by page or globally in order to make minor adjustments to certain elements. Therefore, as long as no major changes happen to the way Sydney’s code is served and the various element id’s and classes, then my modifications to the styling will always stand.

One thing that has been done however that does effect future updates, is that I use WP Asset Clean Up in order to disable by page any css/js that doesn’t need to be loaded.

After setting up my site perfectly, and then seeing there was an update to v1.32 I backed everything up first and then updated. The new version broke many things.

One thing I noticed right away is that with v1.31 the css file located /wp-content/plugins/siteorigin-panels/css/front.css does NOT need to be loaded, ever. Yet in 1.32 it’s necessary mainly for the homepage in which not having it load completely smushes certain rows at anything above 480px or so.

Direct SoundCloud embeds using wp.embed also stop working (not talking shortcodes here, talking regular iframe embeds).

Rows on every page have random changes to styling. Rows with background images by default get a dim layer added now (it’s easy to see where to undo this, but why in the heck would you make that a default knowing tons of users would have to go through every page and change the row options to get their site to look the way it did again…).

Basically, all sorts of things break, and it’s very obvious that some major changes to the way the code gets served have occurred.

What I want to know is if I could personally see some of these major changes so I can determine in advance how they will affect my site, instead of updating to 1.32 and then having to scour through hoping I can fix a multitude of changes before any traffic hits my site, which is absolutely impossible with how much breaks upon this update.

Also, in case you were wondering, yes – after disabling ALL plugins (aside from the ones used in direct correlation with the theme) – the site still has major differences when updated to 1.32, ones that are not easily fixed and would take more than a day or two to work out.

A side question: is holding a theme at a certain version bad in any way? The way I see it is that the functions.php the style.css etc etc all stay in tact without updating and the continued updates of the page origin plugin and other plugins used by Sydney seem to have no major effect on the site I’ve put together, so is there really any danger to just staying with v1.31 forever now that I’ve got it all working so nicely? Will a future WordPress update potentially bring my entire site down? Doesn’t seem so considering the code for v1.31 isn’t anything that wordpress would suddenly not be compatible with…