Child Theme

Hello!

That’s because you made changes to the original theme, which is something that you should never do. If you switch back to original theme you’re changes are still there. But you must move them to the child theme or you’ll loose them for good when you update the theme.

Yes as I stated I’m new to WordPress and just discovered that I even needed a child theme. So I’m now working backwards by adding a child theme that should have been created from the beginning…lesson learned.

The only problem I have now is I’m not sure how to move everything over. Can I just copy the contents of the Parent theme file and place it into the child theme file? Or will I have to manually go through the Child theme coding and try to make the adjustments?

You should read carefully this article. In general there are three ways:
* changes to stylesheet should be moved to child themes stylesheet (do not copy the whole thing though, only the rules you want chnaged)
* if you made changes to theme files (header.php, index.php etc.) you copy the whole file to child theme and introduce necessary changes
* changes to functions.php should be overwritten in child themes functions.php file (advanced).

Thanks for the article, I will certainly read through the details.

Could I use the CSS editor option in the Dashboard that allows me to make changes to the stylesheet without modifying the original theme?

When you go to Editor in Dashboard, you still edit the file, just as you would by opening it on your computer. You can use this option only when you already created and switched to child theme. This way you’ll be editing child theme’s files, so that’s ok.