The Future of Blog

Updating Your Customized WordPress Theme

Posted on 23. Oct, 2009 by Jeremiah Hoyet in Themes, Wordpress

With all the themes available for little-to-nothing, customizing your Wordpress theme has become an essential task in the path to becoming a better blogger. Customizing your theme sets you apart from the crowd of others using that theme — it makes you that much more unique.

What happens when the theme developers release an update to the theme you have built your blog around? Are you going to have to lose all of your hard work just to get the latest features and bug fixes?

This has happened to me several times in the last several months, WooThemes.com (the developer of the theme I use, Busy Bee) releases updates to their themes at least once a month. I’ve made some changes to my theme, and avoided losing all my hard work during an update following a few simple steps!

5 Step Extravaganza!

1. Always Perform a Backup! - Backing up your current theme files is a must! There’s always the chance that something could go wrong, be lost, or not work properly. Having a backup of your current, working theme can save your butt if you run into trouble!
2. Find and Study The Change Log - If the developer of your theme doesn’t write a log detailing what has been changed in each new release, find a new developer and theme. WooThemes.com provides a list of all files that have been changed with each new release. The change log should let you know if you’ll need to edit something again, or just upload the updated files and continue on with your day.
3. Make Any Required Edits - If files you have edited have been changed, don’t panic! Most often there are only light modifications made to theme files, and it’s usually easy to get your theme back to it’s original appearance. Compare the new files and old files, then make any changes you need to get the new file up to “speed”.
4. Test Drive Your New Theme - Before you upload your newly updated theme for use on your blog, it’s always a good idea to give the theme a test drive somewhere else (a “sandbox”). I have a separate domain that I use for this very purpose. You don’t have to spend money on an extra domain, but testing the theme using a sub-domain or local LAMP/WAMP server is a good idea.
5. Upload Your Newly Updated Theme - This step is pretty self-explanatory. Upload your theme to your server and give it a go!

Final Note

Updating your WordPress theme can be beneficial to both you and readers — new features, bug fixes, etc. It can be a bit of a headache, like upgrading WordPress itself, but it’s not as hard as it looks if you follow these simple steps.

One last tip - Try maintaining a change log of your own while you are making changes and customizations to your WordPress theme. It can make remembering what files you have made changes to much easier in the future!

Tags: blog design tip, custom wordpress themes, updating wordpress, wordpress themes