How the hell do you keep up with updates without a week worth of hassle?
I must be incredibly stupid or something because I can’t figure out how to make it painless.
PS! This is a problem for those who add their own (complex) features, modify PHP & JS etc. Updates are breeze for casual theme users who changes CSS or few little things.
I tried child-theme in few first theme updates but you literally have to check & compare every single file in theme after update because:
- Developers DO NOT include a list in .txt file with files that they changed with last update.
- .php files in child theme overwrites whole file in theme – so you miss out new features OR get errors if that file has been changed with last update.
Because of all that I just modify core files & if theme update has some cool features, I’ll code it or copy-paste it myself. This also has few drawbacks:
- You might miss out code changes that makes theme faster, safer or more efficient.
- if new feature require changing like 5 files, it takes time to figure out someone else’s code – all this again because there is no .txt file of changes!
My question is: How to make theme updates as painless as possible if you deep-customize it yourself (child-theme or not)?
1 Answer
First thing first, that’s a very good question! Now let me tell you what I’ve done to definitely kill the annoying proceedings you have described.
Keep WordPress under Git Control.
There are a multitude of articles on the web that can guide you from the basics to advanced steps. I used to repeat the proceedings you mentioned over and over, and let’s not forget to mention the FTP-ing tedious part.
I’m not a sysadmin person, however, it was pretty easy for me to achieve a safe and optimized “Git Controlled” environment using Github.
Learning the basics about Github is mandatory, however, when you get to it, you would be able to achieve an “Updates & Maintenance” scheme to do almost all sorts of automated tasks for you, including syncing between your development and production web servers.
I hope it helps, good luck!