WordPress as a Content Management System offers its users amazing functionality. One such ingenious feature is the ability to create and install Child Themes on your WordPress website. For the uninitiated Child Themes might sound odd and unfamiliar to be a feature on WordPress.
Install Child Themes
Child Themes are essentially sort-of copies of your primary theme, called the parent theme. This parent can be a theme or a theme framework. Child Themes extract all their features, functionality, settings, appearance, etc. from their parent theme. A WordPress developer can edit or modify the source code of the child theme without having to worry about the parent theme.
Almost all of the themes that can be integrated with WordPress already come with a high degree of customizability. Nonetheless, sometimes the need to manually modify or edit the source code may arise. Thus this is where a child theme is best suited to face the development challenges.
If you take the risk of inducing new code into your theme’s core files, then chances are your changes will be overwritten when you update your theme. By using a child theme as a surrogate for gradual modification to the source code solves this problem. A child theme resolves the problem of updates, by letting you add the edited code to itself. Therefore, now when you will update your parent theme, all your edits won’t be overwritten.
Another purpose that child themes serve is working with WP theme frameworks. A WordPress Theme Framework is a theme that provides WordPress developers with a robust base to build upon.
Want to install your child theme? The following point details the process:
- Build a Child Theme and induce the following code into the CSS file of your Child Theme:
/* Theme Name: Child Theme Name Template: parenttheme */ @import url("../parenttheme/style.css");
Please remember to change <parenttheme> tag to the real name of the Parent-Theme and call the parent theme’s CSS file within your Child Theme’s CSS file without curly quotation marks.
