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Free Upgrades for Life

Whether you choose to upgrade/update via the automatic update api or manually, ALWAYS back EVERYTHING up. Any hard coded edits you’ve made outside of your theme options, like directly editing template files WILL BE OVERWRITTEN!…
(unless you use Custom CSS or a child theme to make your customizations)

And remember, UPGRADING IS COMPLETELY OPTIONAL!

Have You Made a lot of Customizations?

If you’ve made a lot of customizations, especially CSS, even if you’re using a child theme you may want to take precaution when upgrading and decide if it’s really necessary. We’re at a point where our themes are evolving very rapidly.

With such rapid changes a lot of the back-end is changing including classes, ids and functions that will break any CSS you have using old classes, ids and functions and you’ll need to discover those changes using the techniques we’ve shared here.

Changelogs

http://cyberchimps.com/changelogs/

Automatically Upgrading/Updating

Go to Dashboard > Updates and scroll down to the themes area to upgrade automatically.

Manually Upgrading/Updating

- First, in your theme settings export/backup/save your settings

- Then backup your WordPress database

- Now, via FTP (if you do not know how to FTP contact your host support) navigate to wp-content/themes/themename and back that entire folder up (don’t delete it, rename it, move it or change it in any way – we want it to stay active with WordPress)

- More on backing up WordPress

- Now download the latest version of your theme: http://cyberchimps.com/my-account/

- Unzip it and upload the themename folder directly over the other one overwriting it

- Now, you may have to reapply your backed up settings and make other adjustments (especially if you’re having issues and need to restore to default settings)

- In case you crash and burn at any point that’s why you have the old theme folder and settings backed up for safekeeping (you can reupload the original should you need to)

Recovering Lost Settings

- Many hosts make courtesy backups of your entire account, you may be able to request restoration to an earlier date

- If your site is indexed with Google you can often search your site, view it’s cache, view source code and recover your Custom CSS

Is a Feature Off or Broken After Upgrade?

- First, simply try turning the feature off and back on, undoing settings and saving, then redoing them and saving etc (to work the kink out), also sometimes the custom menus/widgets might need to be reset from Menus and Widgets

- Last resort, after backing your theme options up, Restore Defaults (button found bottom-left in theme options) of all your settings

White Screen of Death?

- This is mostly caused my plugins, so if you just activated a plugin and get the white screen of death FTP into wp-content/plugins/plugin-named-folder and delete out the last plugin you added

- Again, refer to the hosting restoration suggested above

- To get access again you may need first backup and then delete out your theme folder

If you have specific issues with your upgrading/updating of a theme please start your own topic.

Thanks, Bryan