Implications for client in not being able to update WP Theme in future

  • https://redesign.carpenterlowings.com/

    Wondering if anyone could advise me on what it would potentially mean for my client in the case they can’t update the (purchased) theme in future?

    I’m a relative newbie in WordPress, and not a developer by any stretch. I’ve been customising the theme using a child theme. I’ve had some assistance with the customisation of this theme, and have now been told by the developers that due to some ‘bad code’ my client won’t be able to update the theme in future as their custom code will get wiped.

    Question 1. – what will it mean for my client not being able to update the theme?

    Question 2. is the response/inability to update the them I got from my developers the only solution to achieving the customisation I want?

    The developers have said:

    ‘The parent theme has some bad code in it, which means that it is not as easy for us to override the CSS and Javascript using the child theme as it should be. For this reason, we have had to make some small modifications to the Javascript found in the parent theme. This modification stops the main navigation from “jumping” when the user scrolls. We also had to comment out some of the Javascript for the sticky header completely and rewrite that functionality in the child theme. If we update the parent theme in the future, these fixes would be overwritten and would need to be implemented them again. It’s not a huge thing, just something to be aware of.

    However, we need to be very careful when updating the parent theme to a new version in future. We discovered this to our detriment recently when we updated the parent theme as part of the work we were doing on the site. Basically, the developer of the parent theme changed a whole load of HTML classes. The result was that the child theme’s CSS could no longer find the matching class name and the it broke the whole site and we had to rematch the CSS we had written to the new class names.”

    Any help greatly appreciated!

    Thanks

    [Moderator Note: Please ensure that you are embedding links correctly in your posts so that you do not turn them into one huge link. Link corrected.]

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

  • I’m sorry but we cannot really comment on issues relating to commercial themes. We do not have access to, nor do we support, commercial products here.

    Thread Starter gofton

    (@gofton)

    I’m looking for more of a general response to my problem than a specific support/fix in relation to the commercial theme itself. Just trying to gauge if there’s a work-around to adjusting the javascript of a parent theme, and not losing this when a theme is updated (and if it’s possible to somehow implement this within the child theme).

    Am also trying to work out what the downsides are in general to not being able to update a theme (eg from a security perspective…)

    I’m sorry but this would all be highly theme-specific, so there is no way we could advise for or against as we do not know the theme.

    Thread Starter gofton

    (@gofton)

    Surely my question about the downsides of not updating a theme (any theme) is general enough to warrant posting?

    The problem with not updating a theme is that it will become incompatible with WordPress.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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