Why all the undocumented updates?

Hi orest. The developer would be the best one to address your specific questions. You can find the different theme versions in the GP section of wp.org themes trac. Open the latest version to see changelog.txt. Hope that helps.

Or you could download the current version zip file from the wp theme repository and find the changelog.txt file there.

Hi there,

Sorry you’re finding our updates frustrating!

First off, none of our updates should change anything major on your website. We didn’t have any reports of font sizes changing with any of our updates – I would be interested in hearing which update you experienced that with.

All of our larger updates are ran through a group of testers to make sure everything works without any issues – a big priority of mine is that your websites do not change with any of the updates.

All updates are also tested with all versions of PHP to make sure no errors happen no matter what kind of hosting you’re using.

You can find a log of our updates (themes and add-ons) here: https://generatepress.com/category/development/

Okay, so why all the updates?

GeneratePress is my full time job, and is used by thousands and thousands of people. When you have so many people using a product, whether it’s a theme or plugin, code tweaks/improvements/bug fixes are an every day thing.

I could wait and release an update once a month, but those updates would be very big, and with big updates comes a risk of things not working as you planned. Bugs and issues can slip under the radar when there’s too many changes to review at once.

For that reason, quick and small updates are simply my preference – they allow me to stay on top of developing GP and keep all of the updates issue-free.

That being said, you’re totally free to ignore the updates and only do one big one once a month or whenever you like – you’re not required to update every time I release one (although I suggest it).

So more than anything, it’s just how I stay on top of releasing updates to such a mass scale of users.

Let me know if you have any questions or concerns ??

Thanks, bdbrown, for the pointer to the in-bundle changelog.txt file. I didn’t think to look there.

Tom, this theme is great in so many ways and I’m so impressed with its quality. Kudos to you on that. And I can certainly appreciate the need for timely updates, so kudos to you for keeping up that schedule.

My remarks are more about my frustration with maintaining a child theme concurrently with a changing parent theme. My child theme CSS selectors may follow a different logic/structure than the parent theme. Or I may have made an adjustment in my child theme to adjust something in the parent theme. An otherwise inconsequential and well-tested change in the parent theme would not have been tested with my specific child theme. My child theme adjustments, which worked well earlier, could then conflict with the subsequent parent theme updates. It would be up to me to test the child theme with the updates.

Looking now at the changelog, I can see things that give me cause for concern: “Adjust main title line height on mobile”, “Fix caption alignment”, “Fix table layout issues”, and so on.

I don’t have a solution in mind. From my end I may need to freeze my updates to one that is known to work with my child theme, as you suggest. Perhaps from your end there could be a GeneratePress 2015 theme that remains frozen/fixed, while a GeneratePress 2016 theme that could be the next major version with ongoing updates. I don’t know.

In any event, I hope my remarks are taken as positive feedback. I want to stress again that I’m impressed with the GeneratePress theme and hope to continue using it. And the level of support here, its quality and its promptness are exemplary. A model for others to follow.

Thanks for your reply ??

The CSS and PHP you’ve added in your child theme should always be seen as more important than the parent theme code, so it’s very rare that a change in the parent theme would override what you’ve done in your child theme.

For example, I would never change any important markup or function names, as that would indeed cause issues for users who have created complex child themes. For this reasons, markup and functions will not change.

Sometimes, but rarely, I will make small visual adjustments. For example, reducing the size of the site title/site title line height on mobile – this most likely won’t have any affect on your child themes. The change is so subtle that it will most likely help more than hurt. Of course, you can spot this change in the changelog, and make any small adjustments to your child theme if necessary.

The other things, like “Fix caption alignment”, “Fix table layout issues” etc.. are actually fixing visual bugs that you most likely don’t want on your website at all – these aren’t big style changers, just small adjustments that fix issues that users have pointed out.

In your case, it might be beneficial to only do one big update per month, and test your child themes with the updates.

That being said, nothing I’m doing should break anything in your child theme – GeneratePress is developed so the child theme has highest priority, and the code you use in it will always be used over the parent theme.

Thanks for your feedback – I appreciate it! ??