Upgrade from 332 to 342 - How to keep all my customization?
 

May be another stupid question, but please guide me how to upgrade to new version?

In wordpress "Manage Themes"page, it's only 341 available, I'm ok to download 342 and do manual install, but how can I transfer all my customization to new version?


I have a lot of customization which it will consume a lot of time to do all again, please advise. :confused:

My site Pattaya Beach Hotel

First off, before doing any maintenance, you should backup your wordpress database and the contents of the wp-contents directory - you do do that regulary...right?

The settings are stored in your WordPress database in the wp_options table. My suggestion is to unzip 342 and you will see it is in a folder atahualpa342, just add that folder to your themes folder, then you can activate the theme - you can even swap back and forth between the themes and not loose settings.

the only other thing you will need to do is copy any header images you put into the previous versions images/header folder into the new versions images/header folder. You may also have to change a few url in the settings if you used the full url addresses.

It would be great if one could define an external folder for the header image and favicon. That way there would be no need to allways change it on updating the theme.

This is a nice idea. :)

I have version 3.2 installed and am ready to upgrade to 3.4.2 but I am losing all of my CSS formatting when I do this. I manually edited the style.css file so should I add this to the CSS exercpts instead?

There's a css.php file in which you can copy-paste your customizations. At least that's what I did and it works fine at my site.

This is a huge issue for me, as I am using Atahualpa for my company's blog, and it is highly customized. It recieves a fair bit of traffic, so it's not acceptable to have it go through hours of transition to get it back to where it was each time Atahualpa is updated.

It would be great if we could have a step-by-step guide or list on how to quickly copy the custom settings from the old version to the new before activating to minimize downtime when upgrading.

For me the customizations can be divided into 2 broad categories:
1) those made through the Atahualpa Theme Options Control Panel (Headers, CSS inserts, etc, etc.)
2) other, hard coded changes

settings made to the theme options are stored in the wordpress wp_options table - so they will be there as soon as you switch theme versions.

Code changes will have to be reviewed each release because the code functionality may have been changed. Keeping very good documentation about what you did to the code will be important when you go to upgrade the theme.

I usge people to do as little to the code as possible.

btw it is possible to have several versions of the theme in the theme folder. Just name the folders with the release number. I currently have
atahualpa32
atahualpa333
atahualpa34
atahualpa341
atahualpa342
all in my themes folder and can swap back and forth. REMEMBER if you make a change to an option that is in 342 and tehn swap back to 333 and that option didn't exist, it won't show up viewing the theme. But going back to 342 and it will show up again.