How to Update Your Custom Thinkific Theme

Short Description: This guide will show you how to update your theme after making customizations, following our best practices guide.

How to Update Your Theme

These are the best practice steps we recommend taking in order to update your theme without affecting your students. They can be adjusted as you need to fit your own internal processes.

Go to Design Your Site > Theme Library
If your Master Theme is the published theme, there will be an update button if your Theme has an update waiting. If a duplicated theme is published, you can find your master theme in the "Installed Themes" below.
Duplicate the theme by clicking on the three-dot menu and clicking Duplicate.
Your duplicated theme will appear under the "My Installed Themes" heading and will have the name of the theme and "(Copy 1)" as the title.
Publish the duplicated theme to ensure your Students aren't affected and can safely begin the update process.
Once the duplicated theme has been published, you can click Update on the now unpublished Master Theme
After the Master Theme has been updated, re-add your theme customizations to the newly updated theme.
Prior to publishing the updated theme, preview your theme to ensure everything is functioning correctly.
When ready, click Publish on the Theme!

Document your Theme Customizations

We highly recommend creating a reference document or spreadsheet that details how you've edited your Thinkific Theme. This will make the above process quicker and less error-prone, as you can quickly reference the document and copy/paste as needed. This also allows for Theme updates to be done by other employees.

A few examples of what you can include in your reference guide are:

File Name (The Thinkific Theme file that has been edited)
The lines in which the code has been edited (ex. lines 24 - 32)
Details of the customization (what the changes are, why they were made, and etc)
The snippet of code, or a link to the code (depending on the size of the code, it may make sense to link to a file)

Re-name your duplicated Theme to follow a naming system

By default, your duplicated Thinkific Theme will include a "(Copy #)" depending on how many times you have duplicated the theme. We always recommend to re-name the duplicated theme to follow a more structured naming system, mainly to know what theme version it is.

Below are the common naming systems we see:

Theme Name - Month/Year: Add the month and year in which you last updated the theme, this will let the team know that this theme was last used at this period.
Theme Name - Version Number: If you're making changes more often, adding a version number may make more sense. For example, if you recently updated your Empire Theme you could name it "Empire - V 1.0"

Frequently Asked Questions (if required)

If you expect there will be some common questions that are not covered throughout the article, they can be added here.

What if I accidentally clicked update without duplicating the theme?

While we always strongly recommend you duplicate the theme first, we understand accidents can happen! We do have a method for you to roll back to a previous theme version. You can find the steps in this article: How to Restore a Previous Theme Version

Do I need to follow this for every update?

Yes, you do. Every time you want to update your theme to the latest version, you will need to follow the above steps. While we recommend keeping your theme up to date at all times, we understand that often the changes to the theme may not always justify the time spent updating the theme.

We would recommend reviewing what changes have been made to the Theme to see what has been changed in the Theme to help with your decision making. We keep a change log updated for each theme:

In this article: