child theme – fatal error, seemed to be fine before

In your Child Theme’s style.css:

@import url("path/to/colorscheme.css");

Note that @import calls must come before any style definitions, or they will be ignored.

i’ll give that a try.

do i need to use the full url?

No; it can be a relative path.

my path goes back this far – wp-content/themes/childbelle/colorstyles/blue.css
its now showing up as a rule in firebug, but when i examine the footer the source url hasn’t changed to what was in the file i’ve directed it to.
the blue.css files were in a different directory, and i still don’t know how exactly they work.

The path is relative to the CSS file, which for your Child Theme is wp-content/themes/childbelle/style.css

So, you would use: @import url("/colorstyles/blue.css");

@import url(“/colorstyles/blue.css”) is showing up in firebug, but its not affecting the page. any ideas?

Where did you put your @import call in your style.css file?

before /*----general classes

That doesn’t really help, because I don’t know what else is in your style.css file.

oh right, looked kinda standard to me

/*
Theme Name: Bellechild
Theme URI:
Description: like this - Simple, Light, clean XHTML web 2.0 WordPress Theme with Custom header and Theme options witch include a color scheme picker that allow you to pick from your choice of orange, red, blue, green, or yellow color schemes. You can also include custom social links like twitter or facebook.
Version: 1.7
Author: me
Author URI:
Template:       belle
Version:        0.1.0
*/

@import url("/colorstyles/blue.css");

/*--------------------General Classes---------------*/
body {
	background: #ffffff url("images/body.jpg") repeat-x top left;
	padding: 0px 0px 40px;
	margin: 0px;
       font-family: "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
	font-size:12px;

thats the first few lines

That should work. When you view the browser-output CSS file, do you see the style definitions from blue.css listed?

The other issue might be that the rest of the stylesheet is overriding the definitions in blue.css.

I would recommend using @import to pull in the Parent Theme’s style.css, and then using @import to pull in blue.css.

That way, you don’t need to list the entire Parent Theme style.css in the Child Theme’s style.css; you only need to list anything you’re overriding.

i don’t think there is anything overriding blue.css, the other day i was trying to change the colours but couldn’t find anything in style.css.
In the browser i see the blue.css definitions, but the directory has magically reappeared. i’ll check that its definitely the parent blue.css thats controlling things, then i’ll try importing them both.

its displaying all down the left hand side now, and the bit i changed in blue.css now has no style rule.
just to confirm, i was @importing /parent/style.css and /child/colorstyles/blue.css ?

Yes, but the path to the parent’s style.css will be: ../parenttheme/style.css