update theme

[davidcpa135]

something glitched on update (through ftp as recommended) to the point I think I’m better restoring from backup buddy.Keep hitting what appears to be a time out when trying to restore. Would the fix be to increase max execution time in php.ini?

Topic

[Jason Bobich]

something glitched on update

What do this mean exactly? Can you be more specific?

Try turning on WP_DEBUG and trying to get some sort of error we can work with.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Editing_wp-config.php#Debug

Keep hitting what appears to be a time out when trying to restore.

And what do you mean by this? What is happening and where?

[davidcpa135]

It seems this is more of a problem for my hosting company but to answer your question at first the site was just scrambled. The menus were turned off somehow in the upgrade, Turning them back on solves the jigsaw puzzle look and made the pages navigable but the sidebars were on top instead of the side etc. Got my backup buddy restore and it crashed due to timeouts in the restore process. Due to this crash, I can’t get to the dashboard. I think the only workable solution is for the host to restore to Sunday’s backup.

I say all that to ask this question. Having watched the videos etc on installing the update – it seems that the upgrade would be just a matter of copying the new Alyeska folder into the theme directory. When I try this again should I download a copy of the alyeska folder first then do the update? Is so, and there are problems, would copying the original folder back to the theme directory be a quick way to fix them?

As always, thanks for the help.

[Jason Bobich]

First off, it’s really not a good idea to be making these changes on a live site without any testing in some sort of staging environment. In an ideal world you would be setting up some kind of staging version of your current website, making the updates and getting everything to work right. Then, when you know everything is good to go, then you’re actually making the updates on your live site. If you are managing any kind of site professionally for a client, this is something I would talk to your host about or do some research on for the future.

However, I realize not everyone has the server knowledge or resources to do this. — With your theme activated, every time your site or admin loads, WordPress is looking for the directory “alyeska” and so whichever directory of files in your themes directory has this name, is what it’s going to use.

So, a trick for uploading the new theme is to first rename the old theme something else, and then upload the new theme.

For example, your current alyeska theme you might change the name of the directory to “alyeska-1.1.5” so it’s sitting on your server like this as a backup:

/wp-content/themes/alyeska-1.1.5/ — old theme

And thus it’s not actually doing anything. Your updated theme will now be here as the active theme:

/wp-content/themes/alyeska/ — new theme

Then, say there is an issue. So, you go back in with your FTP program and switch the names of the directories something like this:

/wp-content/themes/alyeska/ — old theme restored

/wp-content/themes/alyeska-2.0.0/ — new theme, now inactive

[Author]

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