Child Theme procedure and WSOD

  • I have an older wordpress site and I was wanting to update to latest WP version. I dont want to lose my edits so I figured it would be best to make a child theme so I dont lose any customization.

    I originally edited the regular themes files, (patchwork) and I understand thats not good. So I copied the theme, renamed it patchwork-child, and followed the wp instructions for creating a -child style.css and functions.php

    When I try to activate the child theme I get the WSOD.

    One thing I wasnt sure of was if it was ok to copy the entire theme directory, rename as -child, or just create a directory and add those style.css and fucntion.php only.

    Ive tried both ways in vain and still get the WSOD.

    Can anyone please clarify if its ok to copy entire patchwork theme directory and rename patchwork-child, then simply edit style.css and function.php and leave all other files and folders as is?

    Thanks in advance for any help with this.

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  • You shouldn’t copy all of the files from the parent theme to the child theme. Instead, all you need is style.css and functions.php. You also shouldn’t copy all of the code from the parent theme’s functions.php to the child theme’s functions.php, as WordPress loads both of them anyway and you may get duplicated function errors.

    You only need to copy files from the parent theme to the child theme if you want to make changes to them (with the exception of functions.php as mentioned before). WordPress will use the files in the child theme’s folder first and use the files in the parent theme’s folder as a fallback.

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