Rural Blog updates like any theme from the WordPress.org directory: Dashboard → Updates, or Appearance → Themes, where an update notice appears on the theme card. Click Update now.
Your settings survive
Everything you set in the Customizer is stored as theme mods against the theme, not inside the theme folder, so an update never touches them. The same is true of menus, widgets, and the per-post Layout and Subtitle fields — those are post meta.
What an update does replace is every file in wp-content/themes/rural-blog/. If you edited one of those files directly, the edit is gone. That is what a child theme is for, and it is worth setting up before the first update rather than after.
A new version never changes how your site looks
Occasionally a release changes a default — the value a control falls back to when you have never opened it. Left alone, that would restyle every site that never touched the control, which is exactly the wrong thing to do to a published blog.
So the theme carries its own per-site version stamp and, on the first page load after an update, writes the old answer into the control before the new default can be read. In practice:
| Release | Default that moved | What an existing site keeps |
|---|---|---|
| 1.3.1 | Headings stopped being uppercase; the menu stopped being small semi-bold uppercase | Uppercase headings and the old menu, written into Design → Typography and Design → Header |
| 1.4 | Post body copy went back to the base size | Nothing — this reset was meant to reach every site |
| 1.4.1 | The scroll-to-top button became opt-in | The button, if you were on 1.4 and had it |
| 1.5 | The meta line stopped being small caps | The small-caps line, written into Design → Blog → Meta font |
Only untouched fields are filled. If you had already picked a size or a case, your answer is left alone.
The upshot: after an update your site looks the same, and the new default is available to you by clearing that field. To take the 1.5 meta line on a site that predates it, empty the size, weight, spacing and case boxes under Design → Blog → Meta font.
Updating manually
If you install from a zip rather than the directory — say you are moving from .org to a version downloaded elsewhere — do not unzip over the old folder. Delete wp-content/themes/rural-blog/ first, then upload the new one. Leftover files from an older release can shadow their replacements. Your settings are in the database and are unaffected by deleting the folder.
If your host requires FTP, the steps are the same as the FTP install in Install the theme.
Before a major update on a live site
Nothing here is unusual, but it is cheap:
- Take a backup, or at least know that your host has one from today.
- Update on a staging copy first if you have one.
- Read the changelog — it is on the theme page, and in the Changelog here.
If something does look wrong after an update, see Common issues.