Child Theme Support?

[Adrian Gab]

Hi Guys,

Does this theme support WordPress’s child theme feature?

I’d really like to be able to make minor modifications to the theme and keep these changes separate from the original theme which will help when the theme gets updates?

One last question, how will I know about new theme updates?

Thanks,
Adrian

[Bill Robbins]

Hello Adrian,

Good question. You’re more than welcome to create a child theme. That’s far and away the best way to make modifications to the theme itself.

When updates are available for the theme, they’ll appear in the updates portion of your WordPress dashboard. It’s the same spot where updates for plugins and WordPress itself show up.

If you have any other questions, just let me know.

Thanks,
Bill

[Adrian Gab]

Hi Bill,

I had issues trying to get a child theme to work. It kept saying it was an invalid theme.

I foudnd the culprit. In the style.css file in the child folder, the instructions say that there must be the following:

Template: Responsive Visual

However this didn’t work for me, I had to use:

Template: responsive-visual

Which is the actual folder name on the server rather than the actual theme name in the style.css file of the parent theme folder.

Ciao,
Adrian

[Bill Robbins]

Adrian,

That is true. WordPress uses the folder name instead of the theme name that’s defined at the top of the style.css file. The reason is, it’s possible to have more than one theme with the same name installed on your server, but you can only have one theme with that folder name. That way WordPress knows for certain which theme to use as the parent. Here’s a bit from the WordPress Codex about child themes:

“The Template is the directory name of the parent theme. In this case, the parent theme is the TwentyFourteen theme, so the Template is twentyfourteen, which is the name of the directory where the TwentyFourteen theme resides. If you want to make a child of a theme with the directory name example-theme-name, then you would use Template: example-theme-name.” http://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes

If you have any questions or trouble, let me know.

Thanks,
Bill

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