Child Theme Problems

Broken child themes, settings that vanished, and blank pages.

You may not need a child theme at all. If all you want is custom PHP, CSS or JavaScript, add a Snippet instead, it survives updates on its own and can be switched off without FTP.

A child theme is for overriding template files: changing the actual HTML structure of a page.

Adding Custom Code

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The child theme shows as broken or unstyled

Usually a mismatch between the child theme and the parent theme's folder name.

Check first:

1. By FTP, confirm the parent folder is exactly wp-content/themes/kalium, not kalium-4, kalium-2 or kalium (1)

2. Open the child theme's style.css and confirm its Template: line reads exactly kalium

The fix: rename the parent folder to kalium, or correct the Template: line to match the parent's actual folder name. Then reactivate the child theme.

Uploading a theme twice often produces a folder like kalium-2. If you've reinstalled recently, this is the first thing to check.

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My theme settings vanished when I activated the child theme

Your settings aren't lost. Customizer settings are stored per theme, so switching from parent to child starts with an empty set, the old settings still belong to the parent.

To bring them across:

1. Switch back to the parent theme

2. Appearance -> Customize -> Manage Options, and export

3. Switch to the child theme

4. Open the same screen and import the file

Your settings now belong to the child theme and survive updates.

Manage Options in Customizer

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A page is blank only on the child theme

Usually an error in the child theme's functions.php, or a template file copied from an older version of Kalium.

Check first: remove any template file you've copied into the child theme, one at a time. A parent template that changed between versions will break when an old copy shadows it. This is the most common cause, and it appears after an update rather than when you first set the child theme up.

Then:

1. Rename the child theme's functions.php temporarily to confirm whether it's the cause

2. Reactivate the parent theme and clear caches to check the page works there

3. Reintroduce your customizations one piece at a time

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Keeping a child theme healthy

Copy as few template files as possible. Every file you copy is one you'll need to re-check after a Kalium update, because the original may have changed.

Prefer Snippets for code. PHP, CSS and JavaScript don't need a child theme, and a snippet is checked before it publishes and disabled automatically if it fails.

Check after each update. If you've copied template files, spend a minute on the affected pages after updating Kalium.

Child Theme