We recommend that you develop your child theme so that you can “upgrade” it to use each new release of Ashford. In a post called, how to upgrade to the newest release of Ashford, we outline how to document your child theme.
If you are starting your child theme as close of Pro, we recommend that you document all the ways you modify it:
- Add PHP documentation when you modify your child theme files
- Add comments in for CSS and JavaScript
- Summarize the changes in the readme.txt file and save to your child theme
If you do these things, when a new version of Ashford is released, you will be able to do a “diff” between the new version of Pro and your custom child theme to easily see the code you need to update.
The benefit is that you will maintain the critical ability to update WordPress and Ashford in order to keep your site secure.