Deleted footer.php code

  • Hi,
    I have accidentally deleted my entire footer.php code for Sydney 1.53 theme ?? I have tried copying and pasting this footer code (from another website forum of someone who did the same thing) and it is not working when I click update it comes up with the message ‘Unable to communicate back with site to check for fatal errors, so the PHP change was reverted. You will need to upload your PHP file change by some other means, such as by using SFTP’ which I do not understand at all…

    Could someone please pate the footer.php for Sydney theme 1.53 here I am wondering if what I have doesn’t work when I past it because it is from an earlier ‘version’ of the theme.

    Any help would be incredibly appreciated this is my first website, I don’t have it backed up and now the pages are not loading at all.

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Moderator Steven Stern (sterndata)

    (@sterndata)

    Volunteer Forum Moderator

    Don’t do it that way. Don’t just blindly paste code.

    Download a fresh copy of Sydney. Extract footer.php from the .zip file. Upload it via FTP o ryour hosting control panel.

    Why don’t you just login to your dashboard… install a backup plugin and make a backup of what you have… files and database, please.

    Now go into themes and install a simple theme or switch to a different theme if you still have one available.

    Delete your Sydney theme or save a copy of it if you wish via FTP (or your Control Panel’s File Manager, or else SFTP) then delete your Sydney Theme. If you made changes to the theme files themselves you might want to copy those changed files back but read the rest of this for a better idea.

    Now that Sydney is gone you’ll want to reinstall Sydney. You’ll probably use the theme installer built into WordPress but here’s the link if you want to manually install it again. https://www.ads-software.com/themes/sydney/

    Once you activate the Sydney theme again you’ll probably have back what you had before as the deactivation normally leaves everything in the settings somewhat intact.

    If you want to make further changes to Sydney in the future use this plugin to create a child theme based on Sydney and make your changes there. https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/child-theme-generator/.

    Creating the Child Theme protects your parent theme while allowing updates to that theme. And you won’t wipe out your hard work done in the Child Theme. If you made other changes to the Sydney theme files before this fix you can usually copy those to your Child Theme also.

    If you later break the child you can switch back to the parent then delete your child theme, repair it at your leisure, or copy a working backup back to your child then reactivate the child theme.

    @sterndata makes a great point too when he advises you to, “Don’t do it that way. Don’t just blindly paste code”.

    Even someone with the best intentions could cause you many headaches!

    Consider this… many of my themes were installed and then the headers and footers were ‘munged’ with redirect or refresh codes in the headers and my boilerplate ‘horn blowing’ and advertising added to the footers. And then there are scripts stuffed into those, too. Done in the name of expediency then forgotten.

    Later on, I probably did a child theme but if the parent never had another update then you’re probably going to get my ‘wonderful’ unexpected changes if I was to then share my headers or footers. No, you sure don’t want that.

    Might be good for me though!

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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