I am still an absolute newbie in wp theme development. I am currently building my very first one.

We found a free theme that was tending in the right direction, so we used this as a pint to start. We made a copy of it’s zip file and some adjustments and changes here and there (in the meantime I read something about child themes and so on, but this is not what we have here). Now we are going to use the adjusted theme anytime soon for our homepage.

Problem is, that even the page is going to be online, the project is still work in progress. That means that I would have to upload an update very soon (update means, that even the templates may change, not only images or css…). At the moment, for installing an update, I first do activate the old theme again (which has a totally different look and feel), then delete my custom theme, update my adjusted theme and activate it – done!

Now, as soon as my custom theme is online, I want to avoid that people see a totally different look and feel. So I was thinking of a “Maintenance Theme”, let’s say, a copy of my custom theme but with navigation disabled.

I’ve tried to get this up-and-running the whole morning now, but all I get is a blank white page. No content, nothing, not even a JS error…

What might be the problem? Is it the naming of my themes? The custom theme is named like “MyTheme”, the other one is “MyTheme – Maintenance Mode”.

Please help, as I have NO IDEA and also did not found a similiar question on wp.stackexchange or somewhere ele on the web.

Maybe there is a much simpler way to update my templates, maybe even without maintenance mode?