Child Theme
A Child theme is a WordPress theme that inherits its functionality from another WordPress theme, the parent theme. Child themes are often used when you want to customize or tweak an existing WordPress theme without losing the ability to upgrade that theme. In the past, there was no easy way of updating WordPress themes without losing all the custom styling and changes that you had made. This becomes chaos when all the sudden you find out a widely used script in popular themes has a major exploit, and you need to update your themes ASAP. It becomes a tough choice because on one hand, you would lose all the custom styles if you update.
A WordPress child theme allows you to apply custom code changes to your site. Using a child theme ensures that all your customizations will not be overwritten even when you update the parent theme. Continue reading below to learn how to set up your own child theme.
SUPPORT POLICY ON CHILD THEMES
While child themes are a great way to add custom changes to the main theme, there are generally used to customize core code from the parent theme. Because of this, please be aware that customizations of this nature fall outside our scope of support and we will be unable to assist you with issues that may arise from it.
StylemixThemes child themes come with downloading Theme Full Package from ThemeForest, and the method of installing it is exactly the same as installing the main themes. Please follow the detailed steps below on how to download and install the child theme.
Step 1 – Login to your ThemeForest account and go to your Downloads tab.
Step 2 – Locate your StylemixThemes purchase, and click Download. Choose the ‘All Files & Documentation’ option.
Step 3 – Once the .ZIP file is finished downloading, locate it on your computer and extract it. Here you can find Child-Theme.zip file.
Step 4 – You must first install the main theme file because that is the parent theme. Once that’s done, you can then install the child theme which follows the exact process of installing the parent theme. You can install the theme zip files via WP upload or via FTP upload.
You can only copy some files to the child theme. We have made a decision to make sure that core logical code that can break the theme is not copied in the child theme. This includes the files inside the includes (inc) folder.
It is not update-safe (sometimes). Whenever we make major changes to a certain file e.g. header.php in the parent theme, you’ll have to copy the theme file from the parent theme again and apply the customizations again. If you don’t do this, there’s a chance that the related feature might not work anymore.
Pluggable functions are PHP functions that can be changed inside a child theme or a even a plugin. If a function is wrapped inside a function_exists call within the parent theme, you can create the same function in the child theme which will overwrite the original function from the parent theme. You can copy the function in functions.php of the child theme and modify the output of page title bar contents within the child theme.
Useful Documentation On Child Themes