From the course: WordPress: Workflows

What is a child theme? - WordPress Tutorial

From the course: WordPress: Workflows

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What is a child theme?

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- [Instructor] There are thousands of free and paid themes available for WordPress, which means that you can likely find a theme that fits your needs given enough time and budget. However, many times you'll find a theme gets you most of the way to your goal, but there are a few tweaks that you'd like to make. If you're using a theme you got from a marketplace or the WordPress theme repository, you should not make changes directly to the theme. You'll risk losing them in the next update or breaking the site. Instead, we need a child theme. A child theme piggybacks off of the main or parent theme and uses any files from the parent not specifically overridden in the child. That means that if a parent gets an update, our modifications are safe and sound. It's best to use a child theme if you want to make changes to the styles, templates, or general overall look of a WordPress theme. There are a few things to keep in mind, though. The first is that every theme is coded differently. You'll need to get the lay of the land before diving in and making changes to ensure they're being applied properly. A good starting point is usually WordPress's default theme, which we'll use as an example in this workflow. It's coded to the WordPress standards, which means it's done the right way. Plus, many themes are based off of this codebase. You'll also need to know HTML, CSS, and PHP. You'll be making changes to a theme's code, and these are the core languages to do that. Finally, there are also theme frameworks like Genesis. They are a bit different and won't be covered here. You should check out our Genesis courses in the library if you're interested in those. While we won't dive deep into actually creating a child theme here, we will get all the pieces in place to set you on your way. If you'd like a deep dive into creating child themes, check out our course in the directory.

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