Noob - Creating a child theme and Bones child theme - so confused!
 

Hello

I am new to using frameworks and have been developing stuff in wordpress for a long time now. I decided to start using frameworks because I am pretty confident with customization and stuff.

After I intalled genesis, I am so confused as to how I go about creating a child theme which I can edit and go about doing my business. I want a blank slate and there is no proper instructions how to create a child theme.

I found some base child themes on the net but they are all so confusing. I found the Bones Genesis Base and it look like a great idea except I have no idea how to edit the CSS becuase it uses less and have no idea how to modify that and make the changes I want even though I understand how to use LESS

All I want to know now is, what do I need in the styles.css and the functions.php for me to create a child theme and start customizing it or if someone could tell me how to use Bones and LESS that would be very helpful! I have been breaking my head on this matter the whole day!

Thanks

Genesis comes with the sample child theme which has an empty css file and an empty functions.php file.

Start there. Edit those files to do whatever you like.

See the tutorials here:
http://www.studiopress.com/tutorials

and -
http://www.studiopress.com/tutorials...g-child-themes

It would be helpful to know what exactly you are trying to do as well. ;) Do you want change the footer? Then look at the footer tutes. Do you want o do things to the header? Then you look at the ones we have for modifying the header.

Creating your own child theme follows the same process as editing an existing theme to do what you like.

I think the biggest thing for me right now is if someone could show me how to use regular css instead of LESS for Bones I would be so happy. Bones seems like a great place to start espically since the functions.php file is very well documented.

When I look at the CSS file in bones it says you can switch back to using regular CSS but doesnt say how to do so, would you have any idea how I can do that?

Bones can be found here - http://themble.com/genesis/bones/
Once its installed, I have no idea what css file to edit to make changes

Would you happen to know how I could use regular css for bones instead of using LESS? The process of writing and uploading changes is confusing me so much if I use LESS.

Bones is not an official Studiopress product. It is 3rd party. If you need support for it, you will have to ask the author.

You may just find it a whole lot easier to use the sample child theme as I suggested and edit the style.css in there. It has everything listed you could possibly want to edit and it just plain css.

So what your suggesting is, just create a empty functions.php file and a css file with the following

/*
Theme Name: Sample
Theme URI: http://www.yourdomain.com/
Description: This is a sample child theme created for the Genesis Framework.
Author: Your Business Name
Author URI: http://www.yourbusiness.com/

Version: 1.0

Tags: custom-background, custom-header, featured-images, threaded-comments, two-columns

Template: genesis
Template Version: 1.7.1

License: GNU General Public License v2.0
License URI: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/gpl-license.php
*/

Filling in my own stuff and then from there I can start making css changes and I am good to go?

And I just put them in a folder and upload it to where my wordpress themes are stored

Yes, that's what I suggested with our sample child theme which has all the css selectors so you don't have to hunt them down. :)

stick with bones. just edit the style.css file, leave the LESS commented out if you don't want to use it. if you did know how to use it, use it, its far easier and faster to code your css. you just need a compiler like codekit, and edit the less files, make sure style.css is the output source, and you are done. stick with less.

Editing traditional CSS in Bones without Less
 

The Bones theme framework comes with two different "styles" stylesheets. The default is parsed by Less and is called "styles.css". There is another stylesheet called styles-old.css that is traditional CSS file.

According to the the Bones Support section here is the solution:

---------------------------
Copied from http://themble.com/huge-responsive-bones-update/
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NO! I don’t like change! I want it the old way!

No worries, inside the library/css folder, there’s a file called old-css.css which contains the old css file. Just reference it in the header and you’re good to go. You’ll also want to call the respond.js file inside library/js/libs/ folder so that IE won’t be left out.

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