Justin Tadlock 1:03 am on December 12, 2014  

Design Challenge Weekend: Creating a Child Theme

The Design Challenge Weekend workshop I’m holding is going to be about creating 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/.. The plan is to allow anyone who participates to have a working child theme ready to be submitted to the WordPress theme repository by the end of the weekend.

What? A whole theme in just a weekend?

Yes. The method I use for child theming allows you to quickly create new and unique designs.

What’s the parent theme?

For this exercise, I’ve chosen one of my own parent themes available on WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/: Saga. Because of my familiarity with the code and because this theme was designed specifically with this type of thing in mind, we’re going to use it as our starting point.

This is a fairly basic theme and is extremely limited in scope, so it makes for a good opportunity to jump into child theme development. Check out theme demo for a look at a live example.

What will we be doing, exactly?

I’m going to keep things in a pretty open format. Think of this as a chance to ask me anything about child theme development. The end goal is for you to create your own child theme and submit it to WordPress.org.

You can grab a copy of the example child theme we’ll be working from one of these two links:

Any real examples?

Certainly. There are currently three child themes available, none of which I designed. These are all by other talented people. I’ve also personally reviewed the code for each child theme to make sure they were up to standards.

One thing you’ll notice is that the layout, features, and functionality are all the same. What’s different is the choices the theme authors decided to make with colors, images, and fonts. Each theme has a unique feel all its own. That’s what we’re striving for.

When is this session happening?

This session is taking place at 14:00 Central on Friday, December 12.

Who can participate?

Anyone can if they want. My goal is to help give good designers an opportunity to dip their toes into theme development without having to jump in head first.

Notes

SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. chat works off-and-on for me, so I’m hoping nothing goes wrong with that. If things go wrong, I’ll work with you all right here in the comments if I have to. 🙂