Chapter 5: Understanding Parent and Child Themes

In This Chapter

• Defining the relationship between parent and child themes
• Tweaking child themes with styles
• Customizing child themes with images
• Modifying child themes with template files

Using a theme exactly as a theme author released it is great. If a new version is released that fixes a browser compatibility issue or adds features offered by a new version of WordPress, a quick theme upgrade is very easy to do.

However, there's a good chance You'll want to tinker with the design, add new features, or modify the theme structure. If you modify the theme, you won't be able to upgrade to a newly released version without modifying the theme again.

If only you could upgrade customized versions of themes with new features when they're released. Fortunately, child themes give you this best-of-both-worlds theme solution.

This chapter explores what child themes are, how to create a child theme'ready parent theme, and how to get the most out of using child themes.