Child Theme’s in WordPress

Child Theme’s in WordPress. Using a child theme in WordPress is always a great idea. The main advantage for me is that it lets me style a theme any way I want, but also take advantage of updates to the theme online without the worry of any of my WordPress theme changes being overwritten.

Making a child theme is easy

You can make a WordPress child theme manually, or use one of the many free plugins. I like to use One-Click Child theme by Tychay. When installed and activated the plugin is visible in the Appearance section of the WordPress dashboard.

A few useful notes on Child Theme:

Don’t let WordPress Menu confuse you

You probably will need to reset your menu system in Appearance\Menu’s in the Manage Locations tab, choosing what your primary navigation is. This often confuses people, remember that your working ont he child, so you can go back, activate the theme you made the child of and check these settings if your not sure or didn’t make a note of them.

WordPress child theme folder

The Child theme, whether manually created or with the plugin I recommend, is not making a complete copy of your theme, usually just the css files are added to a folder in wp-content\themes that you name. So to start your really just making styling changed. When you need to update the parent theme WordPress doesn’t overwrite anything within that Child theme directory.

It’s very useful for even more than styling, but to start use it to change your css and take note of what’s changing in that child theme folder.

If you have questions on the use of WordPress child themes please contact me, Ben Vivante.