Have a Professionally Created Child Theme–How to Update the Parent Theme??

If you back up your child theme directory, you should be fine, but, generally, you can update WP and the parent theme without affecting the child at all. That’s the point of having a child.

It’s possible you will need to reset something afterwards, depends how careful the theme developers were, but, generally, there’s no reason to worry. It’s also always possible that an old plugin won’t work with a WP update so you just have to try.

There’s no reason to update the other themes, they are not doing anything. If fact, it’s a bit safer to delete old themes and plugins that are not in use because they are sometimes targets for hacking.

Since the child theme is created to work with your current Discovery theme, there is a chance that things will stop working, if the code in the child theme did not anticipate any changes. I don’t know how complex the child theme is so it’s impossible to say, really.

There’s a good chance things won’t break, but you have to make a backup of it all in case something goes wrong. So, back up all your files first. Not just a HostGator backup, but download all files to your local computer, so you have your own local backup.

Update the Discovery theme first. See if that works and if things don’t break. If not — yay! But….if things do break, then replace all contents of /wp-content/themes/discovery with the local backup ones you just downloaded from your server.

Then do the same for the WPZoom framework, if there are updates available.

Then update WordPress. Things still working? Fantastic! But….if not, replace all contents on your server with your local backup, except /wp-content and all its content. So, just the files in the root, and the /wp-admin and /wp-includes directories.

LONGSTORYSHORT: update things one by one. Test your site after every step. If things still work, move on to the next step. If not, put the original files back in place to fix it, and move on to the next step.

And again — back everything up!

Sorry @sunrader, no overruling intended! You posted while I was still in writing mode so I didn’t see it before I hit POST. ??

All good, Senff. I’ll add this for backing things up. I’ve found the plugin WP Clone to be excellent and easy at backing up. Far easier than mucking around with the host.

Thanks to both of you, @senff and @sunrader!! Sorry it’s been so long, I’ve been puzzling through all of this with y’alls helpful advice and making sure I have it all.

So I’ve logged in to our FTP and pulled down onto my computer ALL the folders in public_html, the website root URL (is that always what it’s called…?), as well as pulled a database backup from a plugin we have. I guess maybe I should pull all the files too.

As I understand, if something breaks, I’ll get into the FTP and just replace the files there with what I have pulled down (Discovery for a break because of the theme, and all root files minus wp-content for a WP break). Is that all correct? What happens if it breaks because of a WPZoom update? Also when would I need to use the database backup?

Again, thank you all so much for all your help!!

If something breaks, what you need to do really depends.

For example, let’s say that everything works right now, and you have downloaded a copy of all the files on your server. Then you update a plugin called “My Awesome Plugin”. And then all of a sudden, something breaks. To revert this, you’ll have to upload the older version to your server again, which means all files in /wp-content/plugins/myawesomeplugin.

Another example: let’s say you just update your Discovery theme, and after that, things are broken. Now you’ll have to go back to the old version of your theme — so upload your (backup) copy back to the server. All those files are in wp-content/themes/discovery.

So all in all: make sure you have a copy of all your files on your local computer. Update a plugin or theme. If things break, upload the backup copy from your local computer back to the server, just for that plugin or theme you updated.

I see. That makes a lot of sense. So is the only thing that could break in relation to WPZoom the theme, and then I would just replace that backup?

Also, in making sure I have all the files, is everything from public_html everything I need? Maybe this is a total overreach of a question for you, but if you know, I’d love to hear! (In the main FTP there are a bunch of folders, including .attracta, .cpanel, .htpasswds, .pki, .trash, access-logs, etc, mail, perl5, public_ftp, site-backups, tmp, and www)

Thank you!!

It’s not just the theme that could break your site — plugins can do this too.

What you COULD do, is update everything (themes, plugins) all at the same time, and hope for the best. If everything still works, then that’s great and you don’t need to do anything more.
But if it DOESN’T, that’s when you have to roll back first (place ALL the backup files back on the server), and then do updates one by one to figure out which part broke the site.

You’ll only need all the files in the “www” folder – I assume that’s where your WordPress files are located.

Awesome! So I have everything pulled down from public_html and I’ll also pull down www (and I have a recent database backup too).

Thank you so so much and I’ll update with how it all turns out! I’d like to leave it unresolved until I can make sure I’m out of questions if that’s okay; if it’s better to check it as resolved and follow up in another thread, I’m happy to do that too.

Thanks again!!