Update, feature and bug fix code in this forum

[NCornelius]

I have noticed that a lot of feature requests and bug fixes being “fixed” by directly making changes to the core elements of the theme (i.e. JS, PHP and CSS) from the core theme.

I am wondering when (and if) there is a theme update pushed, all the customisations and tweaks that we have done using the code hacks will break our sites. I am currently using a Child theme of Enfold to do a lot of customising and am worried all my code changes will come unstuck.

[Devin]

Hi NCornelius,

Most of the code we give out is for customizations and any bug fixing goes into the core theme. So if you add in a bug fix manually to the main theme it will be added to the core in some way anyway.

Customizations however should either be done to a child theme or the custom.css file in the main theme files. If you are modifying the main theme files with new php then yes that would get written over and you’ll need to back up those files so you can re-add in your customization’s after an update.

Regards,

Devin

[NCornelius]

Thanks Devin, it should be noted by the support staff who post on here that many of their suggestions seems to be along the lines of “look for this line in your functions.php and make these modifications” – these could be simple things like making a change to how a navigation menu works or something benign like a styling tweak that a few of us might find useful. Support staff should be suggesting the creating of the specific file in the child theme and show how it’s done instead of getting us to tear up the core code.

[Dude]

Although I agree that it’s probably a better solution to create child theme files we can’t do this because it just takes too much time. We must work efficient and unfortunately we don’t have the time to explain how to use child themes, how to use code overwrites, etc. to modify the core files and so on. I expect that users who want to work with child themes read articles/tutorials, etc. and learn these things without our help and we can give them guidelines if the have a certain question (like: https://kriesi.at/support/topic/override-the-global-avia_config-within-child-functionsphp or https://kriesi.at/support/topic/generate-new-image-sizes-in-child-theme ) but we can’t explain how child themes work general, etc.

If we start to work this way we’ll get many more questions of inexperienced users (maybe we’ll even confuse them) and that’s something I don’t want…

[Author]

Posts