Preventing PHP Execution in Parent Theme

Question

I have set up a child theme to make custom changes to my site without having them erased every time I update. One change is to remove a wrapper that displays the title of the page with a lot of white space around it in the "content-hero.php" file. The code from the parent file is:

<div class="hero <?php echo edin_additional_class(); ?>">
<?php if ( ! is_page_template( 'page-templates/front-page.php' ) ) : ?>

    <?php the_title( '<div class="hero-wrapper"><h1 class="page-title">', '</h1></div>' ); ?>

<?php else : ?>

    <article id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>" <?php post_class(); ?>>
        <?php
            if ( 1 == get_theme_mod( 'edin_title_front_page' ) ) {
                the_title( '<header class="entry-header"><h1 class="page-title">', '</h1></header>' );
            }
        ?>
        <div class="entry-content">
            <?php the_content(); ?>
            <?php
                wp_link_pages( array(
                    'before'      => '<div class="page-links">' . __( 'Pages:', 'edin' ),
                    'after'       => '</div>',
                    'link_before' => '<span>',
                    'link_after'  => '</span>',
                ) );
            ?>
        </div><!-- .entry-content -->
        <?php edit_post_link( __( 'Edit', 'edin' ), '<footer class="entry-footer"><span class="edit-link">', '</span></footer>' ); ?>
    </article><!-- #post-## -->

<?php endif; ?>

I simply comment all of this out in the parent file using <!-- -->

But every time I update the theme this will be erased. Is there a code I can put in the functions.php (or style.css) file in the child theme to prevent this from loading?

Answer 1

No, unfortunately this is inherent limitation of PHP templates used in WordPress natively. You will have to override either this template file, or file(s) which include it, but in any case something will have to be replaced on whole file scope.

There is no clean way to load template file partially in WordPress, which is handled by template inheritance concept in alternate templating engines.