Themes upgrade overwrote my custom theme

[judgej]

I have the Cancas theme installed, and created a sub-theme of this called "Relax" and gave it a version of 1.0.0

Today WP tells me there is a new version to my theme - 1.5.0. Just out of curiosity I clicked "upgrade" and what happened is that someone else's theme of the same name "Relax" got pulled in and totally overwrote my custom theme.

WP needs to check more than just the name of a theme to tell whether it matches a theme available on wp.com for upgrade. Alternatively, some way of locking custom themes is needed, to ensure no-one elses theme will overwrite it.

Or maybe I am overlooking something?

(I have searched for this issue and cannot find any other reports. All reports I though was similar, just turned out to be people customising installed themes and being surprised when upgrades to those themes overwrote their customisations.)

Here is the style.css from my custom theme:

/*
Theme Name: Relax
Theme URI: ​http://www.academe.co.uk/
Description: Academe Computing Ltd.
Author: Jason Judge
Author URI: ​http://www.academe.co.uk
Template: canvas
Version: 1.0.0
License: GPL

Copyright: (c) 2010 Jason Judge.

*/

This is the theme that overwrote my custom theme (a picture of a black couch on the front):

​http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/relax

Note there are other themes from other places using the same name, but I don't know what will happen of one of those is installed and their version is less than 1.5.0 - I suspect they will also get overwritten by the couch theme:

​http://newwpthemes.com/wordpress-theme/relax/

I'm using a network install.

[judgej]

Formatting for clarity:

/*  
Theme Name: Relax
Theme URI: http://www.academe.co.uk/
Description: Academe Computing Ltd.
Author: Jason Judge
Author URI: http://www.academe.co.uk
Template: canvas
Version: 1.0.0
License: GPL

	Copyright: (c) 2010 Jason Judge.

*/

[dd32]

see #18097

[dd32]

Note there are other themes from other places using the same name, but I don't know what will happen of one of those is installed and their version is less than 1.5.0 - I suspect they will also get overwritten by the couch theme

Yes, If the theme name is not unique, there is the case that a .org hosted theme will cause a update notice.

It's been covered in many places before, for example, recently the theme-reviewers list had this thread: ​http://lists.wordpress.org/pipermail/theme-reviewers/2011-July/006266.html (and the followup by Otto: ​http://lists.wordpress.org/pipermail/theme-reviewers/2011-July/006272.html)

[judgej]

From the duplicate:

"A child theme by the name of Commune gets served the updates of a parent theme."

That is not the issue here. My child theme is being served updates from a completely independent theme that I have *never installed* on my WP network. It got pulled in completely unexpectedly, just because it happened to share the same name.

[judgej]

Some interesting links - I'll follow those up.

In the meantime, the workaround seems to be to be more imaginative with my theme names. These are not being distributed, but used locally, but I still need to avoid accidental overwrites (even if it is just me doing the local updates through FTP).

[dd32]

"A child theme by the name of Commune gets served the updates of a parent theme."

That is not the issue here. My child theme is being served updates from a completely independent theme that I have *never installed* on my WP network. It got pulled in completely unexpectedly, just because it happened to share the same name.

Exactly the same issue. Your child theme is served the updates of a (another) parent theme. The WordPress.org API for update checks doesn't know what themes you've had installed, or where you got it from, just that it's tracking a theme by the same "name", that ticket is to add extra fields into the check, for example, the parent theme (Template field).

I'd suggest naming your child themes "Parent XYX: My Custom Child" or something myself.