Theme version 3.4 update causes blog to crash

Hi! I updated the WordPress Twenty Ten theme to version 3.4 today and after the update, my blog crashed due to a change made that was incompatible with my child theme.

Years ago, I created a custom WordPress theme as a child to the WordPress Twenty Ten theme. Everything has been working fine, up until the update to version 3.4. After the update, the blog crashed (including the WordPress Dashboard), due to this error:

Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Failed opening required '/path/to/blog/wp-content/themes/my_custom_theme/block-patterns.php' (include_path='.:/path/to/pear') in /path/to/blog/wp-content/themes/twentyten/functions.php:743

So, I checked the functions.php file and found a required include of “block-patterns.php”. My theme doesn’t use blocks at all, so my theme didn’t have that file. To resolve the issue, I created a “stub” block-patterns.php file, that contains the following:

<?php /* This is a stub to resolve a crash */ ?>

After creating that file, the crash went away and my blog is now working again (as is the WordPress Dashboard).

So, I started this discussion to get some guidance:

1. Is it ok to use the default WordPress themes as parents of custom, child themes?
2. Was the stub file I created ok to create, in the manner I did?
3. What’s the best way to track these kinds of changes, so I can update my child theme appropriately?
4. Will there possibly be more issues, in the future, since my current, custom child theme doesn’t use blocks at all?

Thanks in advance!

• This topic was modified 3 years, 4 months ago by tomdkat. Reason: Fixing typos