Updating to Divi 2.0
I recently upgraded one of my websites from Elegant Theme’s Chameleon theme to their new Divi theme. I had a lot of custom code but it really wasn’t difficult switching to Divi. Having a child theme made it a much more manageable task. I simply looked through the template pages in my Chameleon-child folder and copied any changes over to the new Divi-child template pages.
Shortly after updating to Divi, I received an alert from Elegant Themes that Divi 2.0 was about to be released. A few days after the release I replaced my old Divi folder with the new 2.0 version and expected everything to stay the same since I had made all of my edits in a child theme. I was surprised to find several features broke or changed slightly. My social icons in the footer disappeared, my header was acting strange, and my page headings were hidden by the navigation menu.
Long story short, it turns out 2.0 made some significant changes to the original files. My child theme files were much different than the new versions. After replacing the footer.php and header.php files in my child theme with the newer versions and adding my custom edits back in, all was right once again.
I learned two things from this experience. When updating a theme and encountering issues, you should immediately check the original of the two versions and see if anything has been changed in the code. You could use a program like Winmerge to compare the two files side by side and let the program highlight lines that are different. You could also check the changelog at Elegant Themes for that theme to see which files have been changed.
I also learned that I need to start commenting in my child theme template pages. I realized if I had added a comment everywhere I made a change and started each comment with the same phrase such as “My_Changes“, the next time I needed to update I could easily find my edits using CTRL+F and searching for that phrase. Instead I had to go line by line to try to remember what I had changed.
One last tip. One of my font colors I had changed in the style.css file in my child theme did not take when I updated to 2.0. After adding “!important” at the end of the change to make it this: color: #fff !important; did it work right. Good luck with your upgrade to Divi 2.0 and please share any pains or joys from your experience.
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