Magento2 Won't Recognize Theme Changes

[mitchellsk]

My custom theme is showing up in admin and  I can select it and apply it.

I'm trying to make a change... ANY change... show up on my  product detail page. I can't even get "Hello World" plain text to show up and it isn't in the source of the page either.

I'm specifying the Blank theme as the parent theme, I am in Developer mode, I have cache disabled, I flush the cache files.

Magento is creating my custom theme files under pub/static/frontend so I know it's doing something and I keep deleting them so they'll be rebuilt each time I try to make a change.

I'm editing catalog_product_view.xml under app/design/frontend/<vendor>/<theme>/Magento_Catalog/layout

I've been searching two days and looked through scores of tutorials with no progress except learning about structure and other thing little by little.

Someone please help... I know it's got to be a tiny thing I'm not doing but I just don't have enough Magento experience yet to know specifically what to look for.

Thanks

Mitch

[mitchellsk · Accepted solution]

UPDATE:

I found that if I change my theme from "virtual" to "physical" then my updates to the product detail page are finally recognized on the front end.

I don't know why Magento installed it as a virtual them or what the differences are between the Virtual, Physical, or Staging settings and could not find an answer online as of this writing. If someone could explain that it would be great.

How I changed it: in MySQL inside your Themes table you'll find your theme if it's installed properly. I changed my theme's "Type" setting from 1 to 0. Then I refreshed my product page and the updates appeared... Woohoo!