A child theme is pretty much the exact same thing as the main parent theme, with a couple of quirks. These tricks allow you to further customise how your WordPress website works, by giving you the possibility of implementing custom PHP templates, custom CSS stylesheets and even your own custom code in general, built on top of the main Blocksy theme.
In this way, you’ll ensure that none of your changes get deleted when updating the main parent theme, as the additional code inside the child theme is just that — additional code. It doesn’t replace anything from the main parent theme and ensures full compatibility when updating.
First Steps
- Download the Blocksy child theme – https://creativethemes.com/downloads/blocksy-child.zip.
- Head over to Appearance -> Themes on your WordPress dashboard.
- Click on Add New button and then on Upload Theme button.
- Choose the
blocksy-child.zipfile and click on Install Now button. - After the installation process is done, click on Activate button.
Loading the styles.css File
Out of the box, the child theme does not load its own styles.css file. This is to ensure that we do not add a redundant request when the site is accessed, as many people do not use the built in file.
Though, if you want to load this file and port your custom CSS over to it, there’s a simple PHP snippet that you’ll need to add into the functions.php file from the 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.