MAYDAY – Did Woodmart update and site crashed

I just updated the Woodmart theme and am now only getting this error in the admin area AND on the actual website:

Fatal error: Class ‘WPH_Widget’ not found in /home1/amdincco/public_html/luxepurses/wp-content/themes/woodmart-child/functions.php on line 88

I need a fix for this FAST!

Hi,

It seems that you have some PHP code in your child theme that causes this problem. Try to remove all custom codes from the child theme and check how it works.

Regards

Hi Artem –

Any code we have in the child theme is there because something wasn’t working properly to begin with and we had to add the code to get it to work! You most likely gave us that code!

So, how can I remove it, just to get the theme update to work, then something else won’t work.

I am having to roll back the site, because I can’t even access anything right now.

Artem –

You told us to load the child theme, so updates wouldn’t affect our website.

Now the latest update has taken down our site, and you are telling us to remove code from the Child php files, which was put there originally to fix theme issues, that weren’t working properly.

I am talking to my hosting company right now, as we are trying to restore a back up of the site, and the rep there is telling me that the functions.php file looks entirely different from my backup at 12:43 am, to the update I just did.

So, why did your update significantly change the functions.php, specifically line 88?

Again, running our site on the child theme is supposed to not cause problems like this.

Sorry to hijack the thread. Child themes are used so you can customized the theme and not lose the modifications after you update the parent theme. The are not responsible if the code conflicts with the parent’s theme functions. Try to debug and work around the code you’ve inserted on child theme. We had bad luck too when sometimes try to implement custom code that was conflicting with the parent theme and took our site down. Again sorry to interupt.

Thanks for your comment, but as I said above, the theme authors were the ones who told us to use a child theme, and they are also the ones who gave us the code, to put in the child theme, to fix previous issues with the theme. Therefore, I didn’t put any code in, that wasn’t given to me, by the theme authors.

My site has now been down for over three hours and we can’t even get backups to work. This is a nightmare.

Hi,

Anyway, we can’t guarantee that code added to the child theme will be always compatible with our theme updates. It just impossible to achieve this. Could you please send us a code you added that causes this problem?

Hi Artem –

Sorry for the delay in responding but it is a busy time of year.

In order to fix the above issue, we had to turn off the child theme entirely, and activate the parent theme.

As I stated above, you were the person who told us to load a child theme in the first place, because you said future updates wouldn’t affect our custom code, if we had that code in the child theme.

Now you are saying that you can’t guarantee that updates won’t affect the child theme?!

Then what is the point of having a child theme anyway?

Our website crashed on the last update and the only workaround was to bypass the child theme entirely.

Theme updates should not be causing these kinds of problems, in any kind of scenario.

Now, there is another update and I am afraid to update because who knows what will happen now?

Any code that we had in the Child theme was code that you gave us, to fix all issues we had when designing our site.

So, again, why are we losing all of this with new updates?

Mj

Hello,

We meant that after update your will not lose any code in the child theme. That is the main advantage of the child theme in WordPress. If you do your changes in the parent theme, they will be erased on each update. But as for the correctness, obviously, it is not impossible to keep it compatible with all versions of the theme. The code was developed for that particular version only. And if we change something related to that part in the parent theme, your child theme may be broken. It is how WordPress themes work in general

Regards

Ok. Thanks.

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