This was an assignment given to us by our instructor to discuss and research Child Themes. The WordPress site defines this as follows:
“A child theme allows you to change small aspects of your site’s appearance yet still preserve your theme’s look and functionality. To understand how child themes work it is first important to understand the relationship between parent and child themes.”
As indicated in the overview, a child theme inherits the look and feel of the parent theme and all of its functions, but can be used to make modifications to any part of the theme. In this way, customizations are kept separate from the parent theme’s files. Using a child theme lets you upgrade the parent theme without affecting the customizations you’ve made to your site.
Child themes:
- make your modifications portable and replicable;
- keep customization separate from parent theme functions;
- allow parent themes to be updated without destroying your modifications;
- allow you to take advantage of the effort and testing put into parent theme;
- save on development time since you are not recreating the wheel; and
- are a great way to start learning about theme development.
Alexander class blog 