The site had two child theme folders with similar names, one of them left over from before. We pushed styles to the leftover one four rounds in a row.
Every round ended the same way. The push succeeded, the file timestamp updated, the contents were right, and the page didn’t change.
A failure with no error
Push to a path that doesn’t exist and you get an error. Break the file’s syntax and you get an error. Push to a place that exists but that nothing reads, and nothing happens.
Over those four rounds we checked the cache, file permissions, stylesheet load order and selector specificity, in that order. Every hypothesis made sense. None of them was the cause.
One line to ask
Run this once on the server to ask which stylesheet directory it’s using right now:
get_stylesheet_directory()It returns the one actually in use, not the one we guessed from the folder name.
Since then
We no longer infer a site’s state from folder names. People name folders. To know which one the site is using, you ask the site.
The same goes for paths in config files, connection methods in code comments and schedules in documentation. Each one records what somebody believed at some point.
