If you customize WordPress themes, you should understand the basic concept of a WordPress child theme. Unfortunately, child themes can be confusing if you don’t have much experience with them. It’s important you understand what a child theme is and how it works alongside a normal WordPress theme. Why is it so important? Not using a child theme for customizations could really come back to haunt you later.
We did briefly introduce the WordPress child theme concept while learning how to customize a WordPress theme, but we didn’t fully explore it. In this post we’ll do just that, and then we’ll show you how to use a child theme.
What are child themes?
Imagine you have a painting on your wall. You really love the painting, but there is one thing that you just can’t stand. The moon is orange. The moon should be white, right? Every time you look at it, it drives you crazy.
You decide you’re going to fix the painting. You get out your brushes, buy the best white paint, and sit down to do your work. As you stare at the painting, you can’t help but think “I hope I don’t screw this up”.
Finding a theme can be intimidating. With so many choices, how do you uncover the best WordPress themes?
We’ve been working with WordPress themes since 2008 here at The Theme Foundry, so we’ve got some relevant industry knowledge and plenty of experience. Let’s talk about where to look for WordPress themes, and how to find the best themes when you get there.
For the past month I’ve been learning how to be more productive. It’s amazing how unproductive I can be with readily available distractions. First, I broke down the core things I do online (mostly related to work and the internet) into three broad categories based on what I was actually doing.
Imagine you’re looking to build a brand new car from scratch. Sounds pretty intimidating right? Now imagine that one of the best car companies in the world is giving you a free “starter” car. They’ve built the car using years of practice and experience. It’s a fully functioning car, it just doesn’t have any design or colors applied to it. You need to paint it and make some configuration choices.
A WordPress starter theme is exactly like that car. It’s a fully functional WordPress theme that just needs to be styled and configured. When I began designing our first WordPress templates way back in 2008 there wasn’t much to help in the early stages of the process. You usually just started from scratch or converted some HTML to WordPress. That’s all changed with the advent of WordPress starter themes.
You found a new WordPress theme. It looks perfect for your blog, but you’re really nervous about changing your theme. What if something breaks? Will you lose any content? I’ll walk you through what you should be nervous about, and what you shouldn’t.
As you may have heard, WordPress will be adopting Sass in core with the upcoming WordPress 3.8 release. Aptly dubbed “CSS with superpowers”, Sass brings your CSS to a whole new level. We’re big fans of using Sass in our WordPress templates here at The Theme Foundry, so this is really exciting news for us. Here’s three little known facts about The Theme Foundry and Sass:
You’ve got WordPress set up, you’ve installed your favorite theme, and now you want more. You want to learn how to customize a WordPress theme so it looks just right. Where do you get started? How hard is it?
You might think the hardest part of the process is learning WordPress or doing something fancy with code. In fact, it’s learning a few basic concepts and applying them when you want to customize your theme. There are even some fantastic free tools and WordPress plugins available to make this process enjoyable.
You’re in a new city and looking to grab dinner. You walk by a busy restaurant. You see customers laughing and having a good time. You glance at the restaurant across the street and see one couple by the window. Otherwise, the place looks deserted. Where are you eating?
This is commonly referred to in psychology circles as social proof. In summary, human beings seem to be hardwired to look to their peers for guidance. This groupthink probably served us well in prehistoric times. You see others in the group start to run, so you start running too. If you stop to look, you might be dinosaur lunch.
So, what does social proof have to do with increasing conversion rates?
If you look at the best practices expounded by most WordPress professionals, you’ll find one related to plugins that goes something like this: when a plugin is deleted, it should remove all traces of itself. No meta data, no extra tables, nothing.
This approach sounds great and it feels downright refreshing to any seasoned WordPress developer. It’s clean, and it respects the existing plugin system, which follows this two-step logic:
When you deactivate a plugin, nothing is removed, but the plugin is disabled.
When you delete a plugin, you get a confirmation screen, and then everything is removed.
Easy right? If you’re thinking about maybe using a plugin again later, you should just deactivate it. If you never plan to use it again, you should just delete it.
The big problem: Most WordPress users have no idea about these subtleties, nor are they 100% sure if they’re going to use a plugin again. The even bigger problem: Removing certain plugin data can have disastrous consequences. If someone has used a plugin extensively to set up their site, deletes it for any multitude of reasons, and then re-installs it, everything is gone.
