Community Forums › Forums › Archived Forums › General Discussion › Pre Sales – child themes
- This topic has 6 replies, 4 voices, and was last updated 8 years, 2 months ago by southernroutes.
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November 19, 2015 at 9:29 am #171514m1000Member
Considering moving to Genesis from another framework.
I assume that all available themes (Altitude Pro for examples) are basically child themes and are regularly updated.
So what's the best way to customise? I would usually use a child theme but if Studiopress themes are already child themes how do I make substantial changes that are not overwritten when the themes (eg Genesis and/or Altitude Pro) are updated?
Many thanks.
November 19, 2015 at 10:50 am #171533SusanModeratorChild themes don't get updated. You can safely make any updates to the child theme's files itself. They will not be overwritten on an update of the Genesis framework.
November 19, 2015 at 11:48 am #171543carasmoParticipantGenesis doesn't auto update, but they do update. My list of themes are different versions than when they started and when you read the README.txt file it has the change log.
3 ideas:
1. Make a duplicate of the theme, rename the slug, then work on a copy of the child theme and then read the change log and apply.2. Make all your changes in a separate functions file and CSS file, keep one copy local and one on the server. Include those files in the update.
3. Make all your changes and update as a plugin. This works amazingly well. All your CSS, functions, everything can go in here take a different priority and it's portable. Yay!
November 19, 2015 at 1:20 pm #171559m1000MemberThanks Carasmo - my preferred approach would probably be to build a custom plugin.
Bit concerned by Susan's comment "Child themes don’t get updated" - not sure how often Genesis updates (used to several framework updates a year right now) but what happens if a framework (or rather parent theme) update breaks a child? Are you left to try to fix it rather than getting a prompt update (referring to Studiopress themes here)?
November 19, 2015 at 1:34 pm #171561carasmoParticipantI think she meant that it's not auto-updated (that is you won't wake up one morning to see all your custom work undone in a child theme that you yourself didn't create), however child themes are updated -- is up to you to update them. Genesis Framework (Parent) updates automatically and I have never heard of it breaking child themes, it was the key reason why I went with it -- it has a solid reputation for that alone. For example their update of their framework came before WP 4.3 preventing all kinds of trouble for people because they are ahead of the curve. Also, because Bill Erickson http://www.billerickson.net/ uses it. He's a bad ass.
November 19, 2015 at 1:42 pm #171563m1000MemberAll makes sense - thanks for clarifying!
January 14, 2016 at 12:57 pm #176504southernroutesMemberCarasmo, can you expound upon option #3 (Make all your changes and update as a plugin.) a bit more? I like the sound of this, but am unsure how I would package the files and install them as a plugin. I've done quite a bit of child theme hacking, but have limited myself to what can be accomplished using CSS as there are numerous ways to override a child theme's default styles.
However, I'm getting more and more requests to extend a child theme's functionality and I'm hesitant to simply modify its template files for reasons that m1000 expressed above.
Thanks for your input.
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