Child Theme

A child theme is a powerful tool for customizing your WordPress website without risking losing those changes during theme updates. Essentially, it acts as an extension of your parent theme (Blocksy in this case), allowing you to make specific modifications without altering the core theme files.

Key Benefits of Using a Child Theme

• Preservation of Customizations: Any changes you make to your website’s appearance or functionality are isolated within the child theme. This ensures that when the parent theme is updated, your customizations remain intact.
• Flexibility and Control: Child themes offer a higher degree of control over your website’s design and layout. You can create custom templates, modify CSS styles, and even add custom functions without affecting the parent theme.
• Maintainability: By separating your customizations from the parent theme, you make it easier to manage and update your website in the future.

How It Works

A child theme inherits all the functionalities and styles from its parent theme. However, it also allows you to override specific aspects by creating corresponding files within the child theme directory. Common files include:

• style.css: For custom CSS styles
• functions.php: For custom PHP code

First Steps

1. Download the Blocksy child theme – https://creativethemes.com/downloads/blocksy-child.zip.
2. Head over to Appearance -> Themes on your WordPress dashboard.
3. Click on Add New button and then on Upload Theme button.
4. Choose the blocksy-child.zip file and click on Install Now button.
5. After the installation process is done, click on Activate button.

Loading the styles.css File

By default, your child theme does not automatically load its own style.css file. This approach is designed to optimize website performance by avoiding unnecessary file requests. However, if you require granular control over your website’s styling, you can easily incorporate a custom stylesheet into your child theme.

add_action( 'wp_enqueue_scripts', function () {
	wp_enqueue_style('blocksy-child-style', get_stylesheet_uri());
});

Integrating with the Parent Theme

The child theme system inside of WordPress allows you to replace the parent theme files with customised versions of your own. This gives you even greater flexibility when designing your web project, but it comes with a caveat.

If the file has been updated in the parent theme and you haven’t ported the new functionality to your modified files, things can go awry and the site might lose some functionality.

This is why it is important to make sure that after every parent theme update, you check the PHP, CSS and JS files from the child theme, if you know that you have modified those.

Video Resources

In case you’d like to watch a video to quickly get up to speed, check this one out. You should have a better understanding on how things work like.