Debugging Wordpress child theme after updating parent

Question

I have inherited a Wordpress site that badly needs to be updated. The site uses the Hueman theme as the parent theme with customizations inside of a child theme. When I update the Hueman theme, the site breaks and throws a server error 500. If I first activate the parent theme and then upgrade it, the site loads fine but of course without the customization. If I activate the child, the 500 error returns. This obviously tells me there is an issue with the coding of the child theme, but it was working great with the previous version of the Hueman parent theme. Just wondering if anyone knows any tricks to help me solve this/hunt down the issue with the child. I tried updating .htaccess, disabling and enabling plugins one by one but no avail. Any help is much appreciated.

Answer 1

Something you can try is to turn debugging on in the wp-config file to see if any errors display. After that I'd try commenting out the js file, and then the templates if there are any. Basically comment files out until the site starts working again. Its not the fastest approach but it will direct you to which file has code that needs to be updated.