Theme update process

Hey Ronald, sorry the direct upgrade isn’t working. It should! I’ve had customers report that’s how they updated to the latest. But we can try a few things here.

First, if you activate the new theme, what does it look like? Do you lose some of your design/styles? You may just be able to keep the new one and remove the old one. It’s possible the header/footer would have to be set up again.

Let me know what you’re seeing and we’ll go from there!

Thanks for your response, Mike.

The theme didn’t recognize that there’s an upgrade (probably because it was a non-www.ads-software.com theme).

Here’s what my home page looks like, after my modifications, using v. 1.0.1:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/17XAv-bD9dVK24BRNfFW1igPb3ro_58z0/view?usp=drive_link

I downloaded the new Ollie theme (v 1.0.9). This is what showed up in my Themes list:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/17T80MRJwZOSJpZLgm_5O7XqiO103GcMz/view?usp=drive_link

When I loaded the new Ollie theme (v. 1.0.9), this is what my site looked like (I’d say it was the basic setup for the theme):

https://drive.google.com/file/d/17S8dD8tYHftPhcutjMM1b8GepU2fQWPy/view?usp=drive_link

I wasn’t sure if there was a way to transfer my modifications (or export and then import them), as there wasn’t anything obvious.

I’m going to blame this on a lack of coffee.

I looked at the folders created for Ollie. The folder name for the Ollie I had downloaded from Github was “Ollie-Main”. The folder created when I downloaded Ollie from www.ads-software.com was “Ollie”. I removed the new version, copied “Ollie-Main” to “Ollie”, and then refreshed the Themes admin page. The “second” Ollie showed up and indicated that it had an update available.

Now, how “Ollie-Main” as a folder was created I don’t have any idea. I had been downloading the zip file from Github and uploading it manually to the site, and it always updated just fine.

Need more coffee …

Thanks for the assistance, Mike! While I wish that the Ollie on www.ads-software.com had the setup wizard (because that was a good thing for initial setup, and then reset when in the event of operator error), I’ll wait for everything to come back together with the plugin.

Ok. More digging is needed.

Copying the theme from one folder to another let www.ads-software.com see it and indicate that there was an update, but the update appears to have wiped out my customized templates and styles.

When I copy “Ollie-Main” to “Ollie”, “My patterns” shows the patterns I created, and they appear to be styled correctly. However, any of the template modifications and new templates don’t get displayed. It looks like the theme just resets to it’s default configuration.

I’m going to stop now. My brain hurts. And the coffee hasn’t kicked in yet.

Hey Ronald, sorry about the confusing transition. The lion’s share of the confusion here is coming from how WP stores customized templates and styles. They are stored in the database, but they are also associated with the theme name. I think we’re all still figuring out the right workflow for this kind of scenario. I’ll be taking notes so I can help other folks through the transition.

Here’s what I would try. First, if you have a snapshot of your site before the attempted transition, I would roll back to that first. That will restore your customized templates and styles.

If you don’t have a backup, we should try switching back to your original Ollie-Main theme. That theme should restore your customized templates and styles because those are associated with the theme. (I believe that’s why they disappear when you switch themes. They are still there in your database but not showing for that theme.)

Let’s see if we can get your site back to looking how it was and then we can look at a fresh transition.

Fortunately, I still had my original folder of Ollie-Main, so switching back to that theme has be back where I was. After copying the folder to Ollie and switching themes, and then none of my customizations were coming through, I assumed that there has to be some information that is being stored in the database, so wasn’t displaying since it wasn’t “Ollie-Main”.

No worries. I have no problem working to get this resolved, especially as it may help someone else.

Ok great, glad you were able to restore that. I made a quick video with a few ideas about how to move forward from there.

https://5v07oud0.clarityflow.com/c/215b1052e2b5e21fa8d793e2e

Mike,

I was afraid I was going to have to transfer my template/style formats manually (not like I haven’t had to do that before, though). I was just hoping that I could do this a little easier. Oh, well.

I’ll go ahead with that process at this point. I think we can probably consider this ticket “closed”.

Thanks for your assistance on this!