WordPress Child Themes

Hi, this is David with Tiny Frog. I am a web developer and I'm here to talk to you today about the difference between a child theme and a parent theme.

All WordPress websites are built using a theme which dictates how the website looks. So it has code in there that stylizes all the elements and places all the different elements around on each web page and that's called a theme. What we can do when we design your site to save time and money is find a theme that looks close to what we're designing for you and then change it around a little bit.

Instead of taking that theme that's already made and cutting and slicing it up and hacking it up the way that we want it to be, what we'll do is we'll design a child theme so that that initial theme - what we call a parent theme - can stay intact and then we add our modifications in a child theme which is a compartmentalized set of code that just changes around the parent. So you have the parent and you have the child, that changes the parent around a little bit. Why this is important is because WordPress themes are always receiving updates from their authors and so as the internet changes and code gets updated someone might need to adjust that theme to make it work on the web, with a new internet browser or different versions of different kinds of software. We don't want to hack that theme up, we want it to be able to receive those updates in that parent theme. So building a child theme is really important to make sure that it doesn't interfere with any of the code in the parent theme.

So, if you have questions about how we make websites or why it's important to use a child theme or sorting out your themes on your current website, please contact us here at Tiny Frog. This is David, web developer for Tiny Frog.