Always use child themes in WordPress
Published on September 17, 2016
Published on Wealthy Affiliate — a platform for building real online businesses with modern training and AI.
I suggest that you always use child themes in WordPress. I do. But sometimes I make mistakes. Here's an example.
On my Wealthy Affiliate promo site there's a sliding image banner. It has default background images, but I wanted to use my own. So I found a few and put them into the theme's slider images folder. Then I set the theme to point at the URL for those images.
Well yesterday the theme developer released an update. I applied it thinking I use a child theme, I'll be fine. But I had stored my custom slider images in the parent theme. The update overwrote that folder and my images were gone! So rather than nice images in the banner, I got big grey boxes with a loading spinner.
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To fix this I had to create the same directories in my child-theme folder and put my custom banner images there. Luckily I had them saved locally. Then I had to go into the theme settings and change the URL for the banner images to point at the child theme directory.
At this point I'm going through and trying to figure out if I missed anything else that I'll need to fix. But I don't think I did.
If you do you ANY customization to your WordPress theme, then you should use a child theme. If you don't know how to make or use child themes, here's a great tutorial from WPBeginner.
http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-themes/how-to-create-...
Or you can use a plugin. Here's a popular one.
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