Should I make a child theme?

  • I am making a new website (my 2nd) and I want to do it right. I am using a theme called Affilotheme and it is has lost some of it’s functionally.I am getting very discouraged with the support, very unresponsive. I have been waiting 5 days for a response.

    I am considering switching to Twenty Eleven but have been told I should make a child theme, is this important? I don’t want to get in over my head.

    Even in Twenty Eleven I would need to adjust the height of the “site title & tagline header” and the height of the “header Image” can I do that in Twenty Eleven?

    Thanks, Joe

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)

  • Yes. Once setup, you can ‘take it with you’ and not worry about updates to theme or WP. (Or poor support from theme dev’s)

    Thread Starter zep101

    (@zep101)

    I have not done this before and it does not look like it is set up that way already. Is this something I can do? I am not a novice, but not an expert either.

    Just have a look at Creating Child Themes. That’s got all of the info that you’ll need.

    The basics of it is you need to create a new theme folder, add a style.css file and add the themes details to the comment area at the top of that file. From there on in you have a child theme!

    Thread Starter zep101

    (@zep101)

    After adding a child/style.css do I need to edit, do changes there, etc or is that it?

    Did you read the page that I linked to? It explains pretty much everything there. It’s pretty long, but it’s all useful and important if you’r going to do it right.

    When you add the child theme, you do your editing inside the child theme. This makes sure that the files in the parent theme remain untouched and unmodified.

    The main reason for creating a child theme, especially of the default WordPress themes, is that themes get updated. When they get updated all of their files are removed and replaced with the new updated files, so any changes that you’ve made are lost and gone forever.

    Thread Starter zep101

    (@zep101)

    OK I’ll read deeper in to it thanks

    After adding a child/style.css do I need to edit, do changes there, etc or is that it?

    This is how you modify how you site ‘looks’.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
  • The topic ‘Should I make a child theme?’ is closed to new replies.