Want to improve this question? Update the question so it focuses on one problem only by editing this post.

Closed 4 years ago.

So, I have one website which was using a theme called "theme-xyz". In past, I directly made modifications to this theme, in header, footer and style. Now, I want to copy this modified theme to a new wordpress website.

However, the new wordpress website already has "theme-xyz" and I can not remove/replace it under any circumstance. So I decided to rename my modified theme to "theme-xyz-new". However, this looses some functionalities, which I think are dependent on some php code which uses $theme-xyz variable. I could go through the whole code and rename the variable but that would be a lot of work.

Also, I think that I cant use child theme. If I am correct, to use child theme, I will also need the modified parent "theme_xyz" from older website but I cant move it with the same name as the new website already has "theme_xyz" and I cant replace that.

Any suggestions? Thanks for your help.

Want to improve this question? Update the question so it focuses on one problem only by editing this post.

Closed 4 years ago.

So, I have one website which was using a theme called "theme-xyz". In past, I directly made modifications to this theme, in header, footer and style. Now, I want to copy this modified theme to a new wordpress website.

However, the new wordpress website already has "theme-xyz" and I can not remove/replace it under any circumstance. So I decided to rename my modified theme to "theme-xyz-new". However, this looses some functionalities, which I think are dependent on some php code which uses $theme-xyz variable. I could go through the whole code and rename the variable but that would be a lot of work.

Also, I think that I cant use child theme. If I am correct, to use child theme, I will also need the modified parent "theme_xyz" from older website but I cant move it with the same name as the new website already has "theme_xyz" and I cant replace that.

Any suggestions? Thanks for your help.

• theme-development
• themes
• child-theme
• parent-theme

1 Answer 1

I know it may seem like a lot of work but I build all my themes from my own theme framework and in the framework I have a bunch of “placeholder” variables and texts that I just replace with my text editor’s “Find & Replace” function.

Additionally, EVEN if both themes have the same variable names, there shouldn’t be any conflict because only one can be active at a time, so only one theme has it’s code being executed.

Simply make sure the version numbers are different, make sure the folder/directory name is different and upload. Then using the version name, make sure your newer one is Activated. At this point, if you see errors or anything missing it could be down to several things. Options not being set in the new theme, missing widgets which are easy to drag from the Inactive Widgets section, or maybe there’s hard coded URLs or assets in the theme, which is poor practice and should be corrected anyway.