i know wordpress and certain plugins constantly require us to update to new versions. but do themes ever do the same sort of upgrade? my concern is that i build a site for a client with a certain theme (even the default TwentyTen) theme, and a few months later the theme requires an upgrade because of a security flaw that was found. when we upgrade to the new version, isn't it going to overwrite all the customization i've done to the theme???
Yes, themes go through the update process regularly as well so you would need to make sure that any customisations you made to a theme were backed up on your computer ready to get redone if a theme was updated.
What i hate about upgrading twenty ten theme is i lost all the modifications that i have made. So i guess best is using child template copy this modified customized theme.
in all the tutorials, everyone seems to be saying that you only edit the CSS file to create the child theme, and it just pulls all the PHP files, verbatim, from the parent. But what if i've made a lot of changes to the PHP files? For instance, often I remove the Comment section code from the PHP files because I do NOT want that functionality on the site. So what do I do in these instances??? How does one handle editing the PHP files???? I understand how it works with the CSS file, in that the child CSS classes override the parent CSS classes. But i'm lost when it comes to what happens with the PHP????
A lot of the time updates to templates are minor so all you need do is keep track of the files you have modified so that when the theme is updated, at the most all you need to do is repeat you changes. Sometimes all you have to do is re-upload the modified page.
then what's even the point of the child theme??? i would think you could do the same for the CSS file...just re-upload the revised version.
It is difficult to find security flaws in the theme. A good programmer can see when something is vulnerable or not, but don't worry too much about this.
are you saying that if i install the standard wordpress theme (twentyten) and tweak it, i should worry about update it in the future even though they'll come out with newer versions???