Why isn't my Envato/themeforest theme letting me update? ERROR: The package could not be installed. PCLZIP_ERR_BAD_FORMAT (-10) : Unable to find End of Central Dir Records

Envato Customers Web and Code
1

Hi, I bought the Soledad theme and it’s generally good so far. However, I was notified on my dashboard that there was an update for it, so I clicked update, and it fails. I currently have version 7.2.3 and it says the update is to version 7.3.0. It gives the error:

Unpacking the update…

An error occurred while updating soledad: **The package could not be installed. PCLZIP_ERR_BAD_FORMAT (-10) : Unable to find End of Central Dir Record signature**

I googled and found this thread: Error when updating Soledad theme from within Wordpress

where the moderator first suggests getting the Envato Market Wordpress Plugin. That didn’t work for the poster there and it didn’t work for me (same error).

They seem to eventually solve it using FTP, but I spent money on this theme exactly because I don’t want to have to deal with this. I haven’t had to do this yet. Is there a way to fix it without messing around on my server directly?

thank you.

2

OP again. I solved it, though I’m not happy with what I had to do.

I downloaded the zip file for the updated theme that was emailed to me, and tried manually installing that. It said that it couldn’t because it already had a directory there. However, that gave me the location of the theme on my server: /var/www/html/wp-content/themes/soledad.

I went to my server and moved this folder (since I was afraid it wouldn’t save changes/options I had done for the theme) by going to that directory and doing:

mv soledad backup_soledad

(so it’s just changing the name of the folder and I could change it back if it broke stuff).

Then I updated from the dashboard and it worked successfully.