Child Theme after updates end

Customization
#1

I haven’t used a Child Theme before, so pardon the newbie type question. My main concern is, what would happen to my customized changes after my one year of updates with WP Zoom expires.

I understand that any changes I make in the html code on the Child will be carried over with any parent template updates. But what happens after the one year is over and I’m not able to install any new updates to the parent template?

It was that big warning message when I set up the Child template that made me wonder:

“Even though using Child Themes is a recommended method to modify theme files, it’s your responsibility to keep it up-to-date and synced with the parent theme. A major update of the parent theme can easily break your website if you didn’t test your Child Theme against the new version on a local or staging environment before update.”

#2

Hi @geoHiker

Usually, there shouldn’t be any difference if the license for your parent expires, and your child theme will continue to work fine.

Problems may occur if you update WordPress to a major update, or maybe a popular plugin will make some big changes and could conflict with an older version of the theme.

As for that warning message, it refers to situations when you’re overriding theme files like header.php or footer.php, and maybe in the future, a function that is called in one of those files is removed from the theme. If your Child Theme includes outdated code that relies on functions that are changed/removed in a future update, this will likely affect your websites.

However, you shouldn’t worry about this type of situation, as we do not do this very often.

#3

Thanks for clarifying, Pavel…good to know.

#4

I noticed that if I go to Theme Editor, the child theme only has style.css and function.php. Why don’t I see all the other php files that are part of the parent theme?

So, for example, how would I modify the footer php?

(FYI, the child theme I have was created when I uploaded the demo version of the template.)

#5

You need to create/copy/duplicate them manually or using a 3rd party plugin.

This is explained in this article:

How to copy files from Parent theme to Child theme

Changing functions or theme files from parent theme is easy using child themes.

Using the Child Theme Configurator plugin you can easily copy files you want to modify from your parent theme to the child theme. You can do that from the Files tab in the Child Themes page:

Once the files have been copied in the Child Theme, go to Appearance → Editor to edit them as you want.

You can also create new files in your Child Theme using the WPIDE plugin.