You have spent a volumn of considerable time, energy and money on developing your website to look and behave in a certain way. You decide to make one small change in your header. Unfortunately once you hit save, there is no “undo”. Cloning your theme acts as a type of version control; something to revert back quickly and simply in case of problems. If you had cloned your theme prior to making this change, with the click of a button you could have been right back to where you were … but you didn’t. You made the changes live on the website, and now you frantically trying to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it.
This is especially true for those people who are not strong with html/css; something as small as one open tag can blow up the entire rendering of the front-end of the website
There are sometimes when you need to clone a theme. Suppose you want to customize the template of default our theme.
What you want to do is to clone the theme and give it a new name. Then you can make customization edits to this new theme.
It is a good idea to create a clone of your theme in case you need to revert back to your original working theme after you have made modification
Since this is a very easy introduction of creating a custom theme, the first thing is to create a copy of the version of the theme you want to clone. For the purpose of this tutorial, we will be cloning EM BaseTheme, which is one of several our themes. There are other themes you can ‘clone’ which are a little harder to do, but once you are familiar with this easy one, you can tackle the harder ones later.
Once you are happy with how your changes look in the new theme, you can then activate that theme to make it live. We always suggest you to keep around the previous theme for a while after you make a new one live for several reasons to use it as a reference, as well as to quickly switch back in case of any unforeseen issues with your changes.
Creating a clone is simple as following these steps:
- Step 1: Go to EMThemes > EM Themes Manager > EM BaseTheme Settings
- Step 2: Click on Clone button to clone that theme
Or click on your active theme or any other theme that you would like to clone, then click on Clone button.
- Step 3: In Clone panel, fill the required fields before saving new theme and click on Save button to save your new theme
Now when you go to EMThemes > EM Themes Manager > EM BaseTheme Settings, you will see your new theme
- Step 4: Now you can go make whatever edits you want in the new theme. You can active/deactive new theme by click on “Activate/Deactive” button.