Child Theme Support

I have just added a draft section to the Theme Review Guidelines, to cover requirements for Child Theme support/facilitation for hosted Themes:

 

  • Themes are required to facilitate the use of Child Themes. A “basic” Child ThemeChild theme A Child Theme is a customized theme based upon a Parent Theme. It’s considered best practice to create a child theme if you want to modify the CSS of your theme. https://developer.wordpress.org/themes/advanced-topics/child-themes/. (i.e. a style.css with Template headerHeader The header of your site is typically the first thing people will experience. The masthead or header art located across the top of your page is part of the look and feel of your website. It can influence a visitor’s opinion about your content and you/ your organization’s brand. It may also look different on different screen sizes. tag and @import() of the Template style.css), when activated, should function exactly as the Theme itself functions.
  • Themes are required to include functional and resource files in a manner that facilitates the use of Child Themes:

 

Based on discussion on the mail-list, consensus appears to be that facilitating end user use of Child Themes is beneficial, so this discussion is the first step in incorporating Child Theme support into the Guidelines.

Please discuss. Do you agree/disagree that Child Theme support should be added to the Guidelines? Are the above Guidelines sufficient? What should be added/removed/changed? What about pluggable/filterable functions?

#child-theme, #child-themes, #guidelines