Theme upgrades on localhost

Hi again,

Creating the child theme manually is just way too complicated for me since I don’t have the required background. I could think otherwise if you gave me the right resources to be able to do it without breaking everything up.

Doing a bit of search has brought me to the Child Theme Configurator plugin though, which could hopefully save me a lot of headaches. Having said that, when I download this plugin and try to create the child theme I get this message:

https://s32.postimg.org/q6w40h75x/contact_theme_developer.png

The lines are these:

– Strict Standards: Redefining already defined constructor for class googlefonts in /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/wp-basel/wp-content/plugins/wp-google-fonts/google-fonts.php on line 140

– Warning: call_user_func_array() expects parameter 1 to be a valid callback, array must have exactly two members in /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/wp-basel/wp-includes/plugin.php on line 235

– Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/wp-basel/wp-content/plugins/wp-google-fonts/google-fonts.php:140) in /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/wp-basel/wp-includes/pluggable.php on line 1167

Could you tell me what’s disallowing the plugin to work properly?

Thank you very much in advance.

Hello again,

It is true that I haven’t made big changes as to need to create a child theme, specially because there are theme custom CSS and Custom JS files, BUT I have updated the theme and my menus have been disconfigured (not deleted) and my footer is completely gone. The four different footer columns that I had set up with widgets in them are no longer there. AND all the widgets included within the Blog Sidebar were deleted as well. The menus came back again as soon as I went to Menus in Appearance and gave them again the language they belong to. However, the footer info I had to do manually from scratch.

https://s32.postimg.org/z8ry7l4z9/top_theme.png
https://s32.postimg.org/qrsfw7pv9/top_child_theme.png
https://s32.postimg.org/lv7kgihxh/bottom_theme.png
https://s32.postimg.org/caplut7xx/bottom_child_theme.png

On the one hand, I have been able to set all up as it was (after 1 hour of redoing the work) since I had the older version still available. On the other, you may agree with me that this is not desired behavior. I don’t think it’s as easy as ‘uploading it and installing it as a new theme’. I really want to know if there’s a solution to this because otherwise making changes for every new update will be incredibly time-consuming (now on localhost is already painful but when the site goes live will be worse).

I’m sorry, but I don’t understand the answer. So do I need a child theme for this now? (in this case for all files? how is this done?) Could you please explain yourself a bit further? I’m a WordPress beginner.

I don’t understand why things like my CUSTOMIZED Revolution slider, Blog, Products, or even third-party plugins like Mailchimp or Live Chat are not affected with new theme updates (they remain exactly the same), but when it comes to the menus or the footer widgets they do get affected.

Anyway, I guess from your answer then that I DO NEED to use a child theme if I don’t want to be changing all the time my menus and footer. But in my case what files are the relevant ones that I need to incorporate inside my child theme? Which files contain the widgets that I include on the footer or the menu changes?? Those are definitely not in .css files. Maybe on a functions file? Can I do a child theme with only one file and no .css files at all? You may feel that I’m too picky and that I ask a lot but knowing how to solve this is very important to me and sending me to the https://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes page is not of much help to me since I’m a beginner… Is it that difficult to give me a step-by-step explanation? Aren’t there any good tutorials out there that can help me with these?