Have I mentioned how easy it is to use WordPress child themes? I can’t stress it enough, never modify a WordPress theme. Create a child theme instead.
I just converted a blog from an old outdated Cutline theme to a SVN copy of Coraline. This is the WordPress.COM replacement for the Cutline theme. The old theme bugged me for a few reasons, mainly it was the lack of basic features such as Gravatar support. I had meant to clean it up but never got around to it.
It took me less than an hour to make the switch. I retrieved a copy of Coraline like so
$ cd wp-content/themes $ svn co http://svn.automattic.com/wpcom-themes/coraline coraline
This keeps an unmodified copy of the Coraline theme. Once it’s in the WordPress.ORG website, I’ll replace it with that copy.
All I had to do was create a separate directory and create a style.css file with the following:
/**
* Theme Name: Coraline for Stefan's Stuff
* Description: Jan Dembowski's Coraline Child Theme
* Version: 1.0
* Template: coraline
*/
@import url("../coraline/style.css");
/* =Asides
---------------- */
.home #content .aside {
border-left: 1px solid red;
}
The old asides had a slightly different styling. I made copies of the header.php and footer.php files into my child theme directory and added an archives.php template. I modified one line in each of the copies.
I tossed in a rotate.php script and copies of the random banner images and I was all set. I did need to resize the old banner images from a width of 970 to 990 but that was it.
Child Themes are cool and once again I can keep the parent theme up to date without worrying about my changes.