Child theme done wrong

[WinMore]

Back when I knew nothing, I made a website using the now no longer supported Buso Lightning.
It worked great (and still does!), but I made a mistake in my first go-around.

As you can see, I placed the contents of the theme straight into the themes folder.

Now I want to create a child theme, so I make changes the "correct" way.
I know how it is "supposed" to work because I did it in other projects:

Unfortunately, in my first project, I can't seem to get it fixed. I get the error that the parent theme doesn't exist.

I managed to get rid of the error by creating a folder "busolightning" and move the files to that folder, so it looks the same as in my successful example.

Unfortunately, that completely breaks my website (even when I keep trying to use the parent theme).

Any ideas on how to rectify this situation would be greatly appreciated.

 

[built]

Did you move the correct index.php file? There should be one inside the /themes/ folder and one for busolightning which is the actual theme index.php

What happens when you switch to another random theme like generatepress, is the website still broken?

 

[WinMore]

I'm sorry I am completely flabbergasted.

While trying to figure out your questions, I tried to do what I did before.

I moved all the contents to the busolightning form again. Because you asked about the index.php file, I noticed that one level higher, there is also an index.php file.
So this time, I moved it inside the themes folder, after I moved all the contents from the theme folder to the busolightning folder.

This screwed my website in the same (or very similar) way. So I reverted.

However, my homepage stayed fucked up after the revert. My posts seemed to be fine.

I couldn't figure out what to do. So I copied the busolightning folder from another project of mine, and I believe I swapped towards it under Appearance => Themes.

This fixed the homepage issue.
So I figured I could delete all the old files that were still left in the themes folder. Well, turns out that then there is nothing to show from my website.

So I reverted AGAIN. And then I tried deleting my copied theme. And now everything seems to work again....

Yeah I am confused. Very very confused.

I haven't tried the random switch yet, will try it now.

EDIT: using generate press, my menus stop working. But that might be because I made some changes in the other theme (I know, bad practice, that's why I wanted to fix this....)

However, I noticed this:

I could pick 2 different Buso themes. At least, when I activated the one on the right, I had the same issues as with generatepress (the menu thing).

I'm not sure why I saw 2 buso themes since my folder looks like this now:

However, one folder higher, I had a folder "themes-bkp", and that's where the fucked up theme came from. I deleted that one.

Unfortunately, the generatepress still has the same issue (there is no menu to use).

I'm rambling and I don't think I'm giving over the right or useful info...
Right now I don't want to touch this anymore xD

 

[built]

@WinMore I would just do this before it gets worse and you can start with a clean folder structure.

Make a backup of the buso_lightning theme if you made custom changes to it etc, download it to your pc, or whatever. Then inside your /themes/ folder, make sure that the index.php file you have in there has the following contents:

<?php
    // Silence is golden

Then I'd delete everything except this index.php file and then reupload a clean version of the buso_lightning theme.

Once your site works with the clean theme, then add the child theme and see what happens.

I'm not sure how your menus are not working currently though, because that would depend on the theme or a plugin you've used, and activating a new theme usually solves it

 

[WinMore]

After doing that, I have the exact same issue.
Seems like I will have to get to the root of that specific problem, looks like it's not really a problem with the theme, but with some satanic changes that I made back in the day.

Thank you for the help, much appreciated!

 

[Ryuzaki]

I’m on mobile and can’t explain at length but make sure your child theme template files do what they need to do. You don’t just create a folder and empty files. There’s more to it the Wordpress docs can help with. Stuff like actually pulling the parent functions.php into the child one and enqueueing the new CSS and all that.