What Is A Wordpress Child Theme ?

A child theme is a set of styling rules and/or functions that are used to add functionality or change the look of an existing WordPress theme. Child themes can be modified without altering the original code of your theme, allowing you to make changes as small as changing a couple of colors, or as extensive as completely changing the look and feel of your theme.

Many WordPress framework themes, like Genesis, work by using the child theme feature in WordPress. The basic functionality of the theme is contained within the parent theme and child themes can then be used as a way of applying different “skins” to the theme.

Why Use A Child Theme

Here are a few reasons i have got to let you use child themes :

• If you modify an existing theme and it is updated, your changes will be lost. With a child theme, you can update the parent theme (which might be important for security or functionality of original theme) and still keep your changes.
• It can speed up development time (and give you more time blogging) .
• It’s a great way to get started if you are just learning WordPress theme development.
• It Is more easy to create a wonderful theme then writing the theme codding from start.

Why are Child Themes so Essential?

While many users choose to use their WordPress themes straight out of the box, it’s also very common to customize themes by editing the style sheets or by adding new functions to the functions.php file.

There are two main problems with editing your WordPress themes directly like this:

If you make a coding error, it can break your website.

When you update to a new version of your theme, all your previous changes will be lost.

Of course it’s possible to overcome these problems by backing up files and keeping copies of changes you make, but this can quickly become tedious, especially if you’re using a theme that is updated frequently.

The best way to make changes to the look of your theme or add to its functionality is by using a child theme. As the files of a child theme are separate to that of the parent theme, they won’t be affected by any updates and if you make a mistake, it’s easy to deactivate the child theme and go back to the original while you sort it out.

Child themes can also be very useful for people who are new to WordPress development. Rather than starting to code a new theme from scratch, it’s much easier to start with a basic theme and then create a child theme to edit the structure into looking the way you want.