Create a free child theme of your own in WordPress

The principle of child theme is to enable the modification and adding features to a parent theme without introducing any change to the parent theme. The major advantage is the ability to receive updates for the parent theme while continuing changes in the child theme. Two minutes effort is  enough to create a child theme! Not that you need premium platform based themes like Thesis, Genesis; you can use free theme like Twenty Ten for creating a child theme. Another advantage is, you can create special occasion themes (basically the same theme with minor graphical parts added) for Christmas, New year etc. With a few clicks, you will be able to switch between the themes.

Method of creating the child theme

With WordPress, create a child theme is really easy.

• Create a new folder in the folder <span style="background: #E9EEF3;">/ wp-content/themes/Name_of_the_Theme_you_are_using</span>;
• Create the CSS style sheet named <span style="background: #E9EEF3;">style.css</span> inside it; to create a style sheet, simply open your text editor (such as Notepad, write the codes inside it, name it as  <span style="background: #E9EEF3;">style.css</span> and save as “All files” and save it. Thats it.

Copy / paste the following lines of code:

/ *Theme Name: Twenty Ten Child themeDescription: Child Theme for Twenty TenAuthor: The author's nameTemplate: TwentyTen* /@ Import url ("../ TwentyTen / style.css ");# Style1 {float: left;}

Enter the URL of the stylesheet of the parent theme <span style="background: #E9EEF3;">@import url("../twentyten/style.css")</span>; and the name of the parent theme in <span style="background: #E9EEF3;">Template: twentyten</span> (for this tutorial) and start coding styles. What ever you write here will override the default Twenty Ten’s css style. If you do not write, it will follow Twenty Ten’s CSS. For example, you have created a css style for Blockquote, but not Make it clear. This is very important.

About other theme files

The child theme will inherit all the features of the parent theme. In fact, only files that are added in the theme folder child surpass those of the parent theme.

If you want to change the <span style="background: #E9EEF3;">header.php</span> to some other free theme’s, simply copy that php file, paste and save this file to the child. Ditto for all the WordPress template like widgeted footer.

Foot note for widgeted footer: the second theme (from which you are copying) might have 4 columns, but you need 3 columns. Simply delete the codes for the forth column (you will understand by noticing declaration in the php file where it begins and ends). You must define the css style for the widgeted footer in child theme’s css style sheet.

You can also simply adding a CSS style sheet and multiply the purely visual changes while maintaining the structure of the HTML pattern of the parent theme. This technique is common for paid premium themes. This allows designers to offer several appearances for the same theme.

Warning for the file functions.php

Unlike other theme files ( <span style="background: #E9EEF3;">index.php</span>, <span style="background: #E9EEF3;"> single.php</span>, etc..), The <span style="background: #E9EEF3;">functions.php</span> will not be overwritten by the theme of the child – if it exists. It will instead load just before the parent theme <span style="background: #E9EEF3;">functions.php</span>. So you can add functionality to the parent theme without “breaking” it.

Use a child theme is a really a time and money saver for both the developer and for the webmaster who will no longer have to worry about changes. A theme in terms of own source code and a theme for the child wishes to customize.

Steps you must follow:

• Create an offline WordPress blog in your computer. You can follow our tutorial for this.
• Take a backup and name separately everytime you make changes.
• You can name the Child theme as you like. But, the stylesheet in child theme must declair that name.
• Take a screenshot of your newly developed child theme and save as screenshot.png ; otherwise you will not get the preview from your WordPress Manage Themes console. Here is an example: