If you have a WordPress website and are using a theme purchased from ThemeForest or another theme marketplace, the best practice is to use a child theme for your customizations. This allows you to update your theme in the future without overwriting the custom code that adds additional features and functionality. However, there’s a growing misconception regarding child themes and this post will help clarify the situation.
Recently, both Easy Digital Downloads and WooCommerce came out with new versions that changed how code should be written to change functionality within the shopping experiences. We started receiving messages from site owners who had placed code within their child themes and were wondering why the updates would have affected them if they used a child theme.
Some believe that if you place code within a child theme, that means it will always be compatible with future “updates”. This may be true when it comes to theme updates (depending on how much your theme’s developer cares about backwards compatibility), but there is no guarantee that your code will work with future plugin or WordPress core updates. This is a huge difference. Plugin developers are under no obligation to make their plugins work with previous code snippets that placed in a child theme – and it’s likely that any custom PHP code you place there will need to be updated due to a WordPress or plugin update in the future.
[bctt tweet=”‘A child theme keeps you compatible with future theme updates – not plugin or WordPress updates'”]
In short, if you place PHP code within your child theme, test your site when new plugin or WordPress updates are released to make sure everything is still compatible and know that you may need to tweak the code in the future to keep your functionality alive.
Did your site’s functionality break due to a recent plugin update – and you need some help getting back in shape? We can help get your site back to normal and maintain it regularly so this doesn’t happen again. Contact us here.