Misunderstanding Child Theme Functionality?

[Kevin Buckley]

Kevin Buckley

August 27, 2021 at 9:49 am

I’m fairly new, and self-taught using forums, blogs and videos. I’ve tried to find my solution, but that fruitless effort led me to wonder if I don’t fully understand what the child theme does.

As I understood it, I make a child theme so that all of the custom functionality is saved when the parent theme is updated. I learned the hard way on several occasions up to this point, and yesterday’s update was no different :). When I applied the update (without a child theme installed), I did lose the special functions that had been added so far. I restored a backup, then followed the docs for Kadence Child Theme Builder, and figured I was good to go. With the parent theme installed, and the newly created child theme activated, I applied the new Kadence update, and got the same result as if the child theme was not there. Another restore, and this time I followed a guide on using a different child theme generator but ended up with the same result after updating the parent.

I then tried to copy the parent functions into the child theme functions below what was there. This locked me out of the entire backend, but I was able to restore a server side backup. I then came here and found an older forum where someone (Michael) had made a video about how to import/export the parent theme to the child, which is what I originally thought would be happening during the child’s creation. The problem, though, is that Michael’s video shows an import/export option in the customizer. Mine does not.

I’m sort of lost right now. I’m going to keep tinkering with it to see how my luck plays out, but I would really like to have a better understanding of what is happening and why. If someone could point me in the direction, or let me know that I overlooked something in all of this, it would be greatly appreciated.