Remote install won't find Parent theme when intalling Child Theme, but local install does

Question

On my localhost wordpress install I am using a Parent Theme called "Tesseract", and a Child Theme called "Tesseract-child". Now, I want to deploy my code on a remote WP install and, for some unknown reasons, I am running into problems.

On the remote install, the Parent Theme, "Tesseract", installs fine and is listed among the installed themes as it should be. However, when installing the .zip file of my Child Theme, "Tesseract-child", I get this series of messages:

Unpacking the package…

Installing the theme…

This theme requires a parent theme. Checking if it is installed…

The parent theme could not be found. You will need to install the parent theme, Tesseract, before you can use this child theme.

Theme installed successfully.

For some reason the WordPress theme installer is not finding the installed Parent theme, Tesseract. Both my local and remote installs are running WP 4.7.

My child theme's header is good enough to get my local install working so I don't think the style.css header is the problem

Now I understand that the header file of the child theme's style.css file is very important and that it must indicate that the Template: the exact name of the folder containing the Parent theme, in this case, Tesseract. And, indeed. it seems that this part of my header is correct because my local install recognizes the Parent theme, Tesseract, and links the themes as it should.

This is the header of the child theme's style.css file:

/*

Theme Name: Tesseract Child 

Theme URI: http://example.com/wpinstallfolder/

Author: Me

Author URI: http://example.com/wpinstallfolder/contact/

Description: My Tesseract Child theme 

Version: 1.0

Template: Tesseract

Text Domain: tesseract-child

*/

I tweaked php versions, that didn't fix it

I read online that php versions can cause issues. My server was running 5.4, and my local was running 5.6. I tried changing my server's version to 5.6 so both would match but that didn't work.

I am at a loss.

My only guess is that there could be some weird bug in wordpress that doesn't handle being in public_html folders? I have no idea? I cannot figure this out. I would like to test out another child theme but I don't know of one that know 1) works and 2) is definitely safe to try out.

Can any of you help me understand why this remote install of WP won't link the child to the indicated Parent Theme?

Thanks!

Answer 1

From the chat.

Changing the template names to lowercase + lower case folders did it.

So @CoderScissorhands haven't had the style.css file in the parent theme, and this also was the reason not to work.