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Ian Stewart On Child Themes – Part 1

25
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25
Responses

 

Comments

  1. Andrea_r (29 comments.) says:

    Child themes, just by using the stylesheet and an existing template, have been around a lot longer than that.

    The newer variations allow for their own function.php file, which is more of the fuss.

    • Ian Stewart (28 comments.) says:

      I was expecting to be corrected on that. Has it been there since the beginning?

      • Andrea_R (29 comments.) says:

        I poked around a bit to try and find out, but I think it showed up in or shortly after 1.5 when themes were moved from smarty templates and just using stylesheets, to the full blown template sets we see now.

        Man, I remember those “just a stylesheet” days. :D

    • Scott (15 comments.) says:

      Andrea is correct. The Sandbox Designs Competition was really the follow-up to Alex King’s WordPress Styles Competition, but I appreciate the nod by Ian. :D

  2. Randy (6 comments.) says:

    I have to say I’ve been avoiding reading about Child themes because I thought I might like them and thus end up spending countless hours reading about the possibilities and how-to’s and what not…

    Honestly though, how freaking simple is that.. I love this and it fits perfect for me. I have a base Template that I’ve created which really only get updated once a month while my client themes seem to be changing regularly with every whimiscle idea they have.

    I think with the Overwrite made available were going to start seeing a lot of good things from the WP theme community…

    extra question for anyone,,,

    Is their any talk of a full blown Official WP desktop app any time in the future…(marsEdit is great, but im talking about full admin, Database and Posting features… just a thought)

  3. demetris (1 comments.) says:

    Good interview! Thanks, Ian and Jeff.

    I played a bit with child themes and child templates in 2.7, and they work as they are supposed to, but I don’t find this possibility as hassle-free as what is available now.

    Here is why — please, someone correct me if I got anything wrong.

    In child stylesheets, for example, you can take advantage of the cascade, override parts of the parent stylesheet, and keep using the rest as it is improved/changed/fixed from one upgrade to the next.

    Child templates, on the other hand, are cut off from the equivalent templates of the parent theme, which they override. If you want to keep up with changes/fixes/improvements in the parent template, you will have to run a comparison/merge every time the parent theme is updated. The real advantage, as I understand it, is that your modifications cannot be overriden by accident, which can easily happen if you modify a template of the parent theme in place.

    Greetings,
    Demetris

    • Andrea_R (29 comments.) says:

      Yep, that’s what I got out of it too.

      I like being able to use the template files from another theme and my own stylesheet, but I’m not sure how often I’d use a full child theme.

      I tend to rip themes apart and make them my own anyway, so I don’t often follow through with a theme upgrade. :D

      I could see how it would be useful though.

  4. Kerry Webster (12 comments.) says:

    His responses were so long…
    Should be “His responses were so thorough…” :)
    Nice interview. This is a great aspect of WP that is starting to catch a little fire. Even though it has been around awhile the uses being championed by a few key designers is great. Thanks for the info.

  5. Carson (46 comments.) says:

    I can see benefits from child themes for serious developers, but if I wanted to take a base theme and just change the stylesheet to suit myself I would simply rename the base style.css file to base_style.css and then modify style.css. The base stylesheet is always there if I need to refer back to it.

    On the “upgrade-readiness” offered by child themes: What if the upgrade to the parent theme changes some of the html class and/or id names or adds new ones? If so you have to make some changes to your child theme to maintain the style of your site.

  6. Jacob Santos (4 comments.) says:

    There is another reason to use child themes. I wrote about on my blog, but I’ll summarize here. With WordPress 2.7, you will be able to upgrade themes located on the Themes Extend on wordpress.org. If you modify your themes that you downloaded from that site and upgrade, you will lose all of your modifications. By creating child themes, you don’t have to worry about that. You can edit the files you need and still get updates from the files you don’t.

  7. Alexa says:

    Hi – I understand the need for the child theme but in my case, it’s late as I’ve already made changes to not only the CSS but a few of the php files. Can you specifically tell me how to “create” a child theme from the theme as it is now on the server (it’s live!) as it’s what I want, then I can reload the parent theme as I still have the original install files. The theme released an udpate and that’s when I realized I was in trouble from my changes.

    Thank you for your help –
    Alexa



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