Always use child themes in WordPress
I suggest that you always use child themes in WordPress. I do. But sometimes I make mistakes. Here's an example.
On my Wealthy Affiliate promo site there's a sliding image banner. It has default background images, but I wanted to use my own. So I found a few and put them into the theme's slider images folder. Then I set the theme to point at the URL for those images.
Well yesterday the theme developer released an update. I applied it thinking I use a child theme, I'll be fine. But I had stored my custom slider images in the parent theme. The update overwrote that folder and my images were gone! So rather than nice images in the banner, I got big grey boxes with a loading spinner.
To fix this I had to create the same directories in my child-theme folder and put my custom banner images there. Luckily I had them saved locally. Then I had to go into the theme settings and change the URL for the banner images to point at the child theme directory.
At this point I'm going through and trying to figure out if I missed anything else that I'll need to fix. But I don't think I did.
If you do you ANY customization to your WordPress theme, then you should use a child theme. If you don't know how to make or use child themes, here's a great tutorial from WPBeginner.
http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-themes/how-to-create-...
Or you can use a plugin. Here's a popular one.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/child-theme-configur...
Recent Comments
18
Well, yes, great info. I had heard about child themes, but never really thought about it.
Thanks a lot, I will download the plugin immediately.
Heidi
Thanks Darrel I must admit that this is the first time I'm hearing about this. Thanks for your informative blog.
Thanks, Darrel, I was not aware of this issue with parent and child themes. Actually, I knew nothing about them. We learn something every day.
Thanks for your post.
Cheers Kev
This is great to know!
My personal barrier's still up if I have to change something in a URL, guess when I'm that far, I'll be over that....☺
Seems like we've all gotta' learn this lesson the hard way, huh. Been there done that Darrel.
Thanks,
Trish
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I just created my child theme, it was super easy with the plugin. Thanks for the info! Would you delete the plugin after the process or keep it in the list?. Thanks a lot!
I'm not positive, but I think you may need to leave the plugin active. I'm writing a blog post about this for my site and I'll be doing test for that. I'll let you know what I find out.
Great, thanks!
Ok, well that was easy. (Gotta love the WA platform.) Six minutes to spin up a WP site, update it to 4.6, install the child theme plugin, make a customization, and then deactivate the plugin. My customizations stay in place.
I think this plugin is simply creating the child theme for you. Once the child theme is there then the plugin isn't actively doing anything, so I guess you can deactivate it. No reason to delete it.
But since it's not really actively doing anything I don't think there's any harm in leaving it active.
Thanks for your thoughts. I am thinking about the advice given to not have too many plugins in the site for speed reasons. Kyle says no more than 5 !!, I am far over that limit, wouldn't make it at all with 5, beginning with the 2 already there, translator, font-plugin and cloner/backup plugin, would already be 5.......
I understand what you're saying. But in my opinion limiting a site to just 5 plugins is a good goal, not a hard and fast rule. I have 8 active on my site with no issues. I also run an ecommerce site that has around 25 active plugins. They're all necessary for what we're needing to do there. That site also runs fine.
If you're worried about it though, just deactivate the plugin after you're done creating the child theme.
I did. Thank you. Because I have more than 10 plugins running there already.....