Great news! Elegant Themes announced today that you no longer have to jump through hoops to update your Elegant Themes WordPress theme.
Forget everything I told you in this post. Now updating your theme is a much simpler process.
Before beginning, always back up WordPress — database and files! — in case something goes wrong.
#1. Download and Install the Elegant Themes Updater
Install the plugin the same way you would any other — click on Plugins / Add New. Then select Upload and navigate to your saved zip file.
Follow the prompts to install and activate it.
#2. Validate your Elegant Themes Account
From the Plugins page click Settings under Elegant Themes Uploader plugin or go to your dashboard Settings / General and scroll down.
You’ll find a new area, labeled Elegant Themes Automatic Update Settings.
Enter your Elegant Themes username in the box provided.
Click the Elegant Themes API Key link to obtain your API key, then copy/paste it into the appropriate box.
Click Save Changes.
#3. Update the Theme
Navigate to Appearance / Themes, and you’ll notice something new — at the top of the graphic showing the theme (I’m using Nexus Theme for this example), you’ll see the words Update Available. Click on it to update your theme.
You’ll see a popup warning you that any customizations you made might be lost. Click OK to continue or Cancel to stop.
After clicking OK, you’ll see something that looks like this (I’ve blocked out the personal information here, but you’ll see a series of letters and numbers.)
Going forward, when Elegant Themes makes a new update available for your theme, updating is automatic!
Thank you for this great website. I appreciate the time and effort that goes into putting this information together… Okay the reason for my question is I paid for Divi a few weeks ago and decided not to use it right away. I wanted to finish my website off with a free theme to get it launched (possibly a mistake in retrospect).
However I wanted to now work on using Divi. I set up a new folder on my server and installed WP on there, then copied all the Divi folders across. So far so good – it all worked and I started exploring what Divi could do. (Great theme that’s for sure). But I struck a problem that the slider on the homepage would not open a browser box for me to insert new slides. I thought I’d update the theme, then discovered that it wasn’t that easy.
Now I’m stuck – your instructions don’t help me as I don’t have the ‘auto update’ settings you refer to. I have written to ET but they were not helpful. So I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to spend more on this project, but it seems like it will stall unless I pay for support now. Any help would be appreciated. (Sorry it’s a long question 🙂 ). David.
Hello again – sorry to have bothered you about updating Divi. I have now dug into the documentation and discovered buried deep in the documentation what I need to do. I honestly couldn’t believe that they could have made it so difficult given how great the rest of their presentation is. (I’m a writer so I find it incredible that developers are so bad at writing)
Anyway… Bottom line; I seem to have a new version and the slider looks like it’s going to work. Sorry to have bothered you before. David Robinson.
Hi David,
First thing you need to do is download the updater zip file — it’s the very first instruction above and the link is there as well.
That should take care of it for you!
How do I update an old version of Chameleon (Elegant Themes) when the header.php and footer.php files have been edited?
That’s an excellent question. I see you’re using a modified Chameleon theme. If you’ve made your change in a child theme, you can update Chameleon with no problem. If your changes were made directly to those files inside the theme, you’ll need to save your changes in the child theme first, then apply the update.
You can modify the functions.php file simply by adding a functions.php to your child theme with only the changes. Any other php files, though, need to be added to the child theme in their entirety.
Copy the entire file into your child theme, then make or add your changes. So if you have a file named home.php, for example, in your parent theme and you want to take out or change a section of the homepage layout, copy the entire file into your new folder. Then make your changes and save it in your child theme’s folder. The same would be true for header.php and footer.php files.
Let me know how it goes!
Dear,
I was a subscriber to Elegant Themes and got all the themes back on 2011 but i’m not a subscriber anymore.
Can I update my themes? Or do I have to be a subscriber again? Thanks in advance
Hi Eric, in order to receive any upgrades, you need to have an active subscription.
Great information. Will this plugin also keep the DiviBuilder plugin up to date? I am setting up an intranet with a non-ET theme but am thinking about using the Divi Builder plugin.
Good question, Fred. I’ve not used the plugin, so I have no personal experience with it. But my assumption would be the theme updater is just for themes.
Thanks for showing how to get to this. I’ve been fighting with it for a while now trying to update my Divi theme. Awesome job!