I purchased Vintage Immersed today, for the benefit of being able to secure its ongoing updates and/or bug fixes. (I had downloaded the theme nine years ago, during a promotional period where it had been offered free. Last year a WordPress update caused a function to disappear entirely — I’m using a plugin to cover it — so I concluded I really need to secure a current healthy version, sooner rather than later.)

The problem I’ve encountered is that because I have the identically-named promo theme already installed (version 2.2), WordPress can’t install the updated version as a new theme — it only offers to replace the one in current use on my live site. I imagine this would cause some problems as a result of the changes made with various plugins to the promo theme over the last nine years. I had intended to apply the new theme on a staging site first, to verify all was okay before migrating it to the production site.

Is that intention possible? Is there a way to have both themes active at once — perhaps by re-naming one or the other? Or is my only option to overwrite the 2012 version, and hope for the best?

(The 2012 version has been customised directly. This time around, I want to leave the main theme unchanged and apply my customisations to a child theme…because the internet tells me I should have done that the first time, and hindsight always comes too late.)