Theme Name Change Issue

[Travis Hartliep]

I have a website that I recently built using Jump Start and half way through the project I remembered that I needed to change the theme name in the style.css file in the jumpstart child theme. However, when I do this now it screws up or even loses some of my theme option settings and my widget areas and settings.

Topic

[Jason Bobich]

Hello,

Widgets and Menus are essentially out of your control. WordPress associates these with the current theme. You just need to take a few minutes and re-configure them.

Any widgets you configured before are probably just jumbled into different widget areas or they’re in the “Inactive Widgets” section below on the page. So realistically, it shouldn’t be too difficult to move things back around into the right place because most of the widgets should maintain their actual settings.

Any menus you created previously will still be there, you just need to take a second and re-assign them to the theme’s menu locations under Appearance > Menus.

As far as the the theme options, here’s a complete article on how that works:

http://dev.themeblvd.com/tutorial/saving-theme-options-and-switching-themes/

You do have the ability to filter how the theme options are retrieved and saved, as it shows in the article:

function my_option_id() {
    return 'my_custom_option_id';
}
add_filter( 'themeblvd_option_id', 'my_option_id' );

But you’d need to know what they were saved under before. That is going to depend on what Child theme you were using when you started, and what exactly it’s name was. You can also probably figure out the ID by going to http://yoursite.com/wp-admin/options.php, and just searching the page with your web browser (ctrl+F) to find the proper ID; it’s most likely going to have the word “child” in it because starter child theme are named like “Default Starter Child Theme.”

[Author]

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