Create child themes in WordPress –

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As you delve deeper into WordPress you will surely have the need to make modifications to the files about the topic.

It is true that many themes, especially paid ones, have many options to configure colors, design, etc.

However if you find any modification that can only be done through your theme files or simply because you want to have all your modifications centralized in files, then you can make a child theme or child-theme.

What is a child theme in WordPress?

A child theme or child theme is an additional theme to the main one that inherits all the functionalities of the original or parent WordPress theme or template, in which you can make changes to the template without losing them when you update the parent or original template.

A child theme ensures that if you update the parent theme your code modifications will be preservedsince you will have made them in the child theme files.

In addition, the Child Theme inherits all the files of the parent theme, however the child theme can overwrite these files and add additional code to the theme or parent.

Creating a child theme through a plugin

There are several plugins that have the functionality to create child themes, in this case we will do it using the plugin.

From the WordPress backend under Plugins > Add New, search for the term “child theme”, and locate the plugin.

After installing and activating it, a new menu option will appear under the Tools menu, as shown in the following image:

When accessing it you will see a screen that shows the first three steps, by default it detects the active theme based on which the child theme will be created, in our example it is the Store Front theme, to continue with the process click Analyze.

Additional steps will then appear, unless you want to specify something special for the child theme, I recommend leaving all of these defaults and simply scroll to the bottom and click Create New Child Theme.

With this you will have the child theme created, a message will appear that it has been created correctly.

Now to activate it go to Appearance > Themes, locate the child theme and activate it, as shown in the following image:

To end don’t forget to uninstall the plugin Child theme Configurator, since it only served this specific task of creating a child theme.

Creating a child theme manually

The other option is to create the child theme manually, for this you will need to create a folder and some files, you can use an FTP program or the File Manager of your .

In it locate the path: wp-content/themes/

There you will create a new folder for child themefor the name of the folder I recommend that you include the name of the parent theme followed by the text “child”.

In our example we will create a child theme for the storefront theme, so the folder name will be: storefront-child.

Access that folder and we will create two files, the style.css file and the functions.php file

Inside the style.css file add a code similar to as shown below:

/* Theme Name: storefront child theme Description: Child theme to make code customizations Author: Jhon Marreros G. Author URL: https://yoursite.com Template: storefront Version: 1.0 License: GNU General Public License v2 or later License URI : http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html Text Domain: storefront-child */

Change the values ​​of according to your needsThe main ones are:

• Theme Name: The name of the child theme, it is recommended to keep the name of the parent theme as part of the new name.
• Description: Description of the new child theme
• Author: Name of the author of the child theme
• Author URL: Author website
• Template: This is the reference to the parent theme, you must place the name of the parent theme folder.
• Version: version of the child theme
• License: Name of the default license
• License URI: Url for additional information on the license used.
• Text Domain: identification for translations of the child theme

After also edit the functions.php file and add the following code:

function enqueue_styles_child_theme() { $parent_style=”parent-style”; $child_style=”child-style”; wp_enqueue_style( $parent_style, get_template_directory_uri() . ‘/style.css’ ); wp_enqueue_style( $child_style, get_stylesheet_directory_uri() . ‘/style.css’, array( $parent_style ), wp_get_theme()->get(‘Version’) ); } add_action( ‘wp_enqueue_scripts’, ‘enqueue_styles_child_theme’ );

Once this is done, if you go to Appearance > Themes, you will see that you already have a new child-theme that you can activate.

conclusion

As you have seen, you have no excuses not to use a child theme, it is very easy to create it, in addition all the code modifications you make will be centralized and logically you will not lose these modifications when updating the parent theme.

The following video details the above points.

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