How To Create A Child Theme For WordPress - It's SUPER EASY, with this video

Welcome back for another video my name is Adam from WPCrafter.com were I make videos for non-techies like me and in this video I want to make it the easiest video on YouTube on how to make a child theme for your website and some people completely overcomplicate this whole thing in it should be that complicated at all now of them just take 30 seconds talk about why you want to child theme is a good best practice to have a child theme on your website so the way it works is you have your parent theme and if you change anything and that parents name and then there's an update to the parent theme all your changes as for scooting custom styles they all get completely wiped out and that's why you have this thing called the child theme so the child theme is linked to the parent just in like in life when there's a child this is dependent upon the parent for their existence is the same thing with the child theme and apparent theme that child theme is dependent upon the parenting for its existence now you want to child themes you can put your customizations inside the child theme and that makes all of your customizations upgrade is safe so now when there is an update to your parent think you can update it and you don't lose any of your code customizations now for me on my website I have extensive code customizations I love the theme that I bought for my website but it wasn't everything that I wanted it to be so I changed it over time and I can comfortably change anything on this theme and no one that there is an update on the to be safe so let me show you how to do this now I did make a YouTube video on how to do this about a year ago so wildly popular video over 100,000 views on it but I wanted to just redo this video so working to create this child theme using a plug-in to create it and it's so easy to use so I'm logged into WordPress and I want to go to plug-ins add new and working who download and install this plug and so first of all let's just type child thing and this is going to show us all the different plug-ins that are available that are related to child themes now I'm many use this one here it's called the child theme configurator and its currently active on hundred thousand sites now when we use this plug-in to create a child theme you can then disable and delete the plug-ins you don't have to have it on your website forever it it does have some useful utilities that make it nice and convenient but you don't have to have it now my old video I think I was using this one click child theme and that's a good one as well but this one makes the process smoother so let me click on install now and then I'm going to go ahead and activate it now with the way we use this plug-in is there's a new option underneath tools so you can go to tools and then child themes right here let me tell you the problem with the other plug-in and why I am now recommending using this plug-in there is some challenges you could face when you put a child theme on an existing website where you already customized your menus and you may have customize some things in the customizer now what happens is if you just install a child theme your GNU WordPress sees it as a different theme so all those menus you put in different locations they're knocking to be there anymore all those widgets you put in different locations they're knocking to be there anymore and all those customizer custom-made positions they're knocking to be there anymore either and that's a big problem in that was causing some problems for some people with this plug-in does a little better is that it takes those widgets and menus and customizations you made in it throws them into the child theme for you and it makes it so easy so working a first go right here in order and click on create a new child theme and then right here we need to choose what the parent theme is now I actually have three themes installed on the site because I use it for testing this is the active theme right now so many choose that so that's the theme I want to make a child theme for so first of the click on analyze and then here working to just follow a couple more steps so forcible we are going to give the team a folder name and we can just use the default typically you want the name of the parent theme-and then it'll just say child and so that makes it really easy so you can just leave that the same here's another option number five which is going to keep this one check to this is primary stylesheet and then we scroll down actually all these were pretty much can he keep the default but I do want to talk about it and here's an option for the style sheet handling really that the same I'm here on option seven this is where you might want to change it a little bit so when I go here you can actually give the child theme a different name it could be just the name of the parent theme in the word child or you can name it whatever the heck you wanted is usually a link to to where this thing can be found in you can put whatever you want you can change the author name you can change the author website and the description let me actually show you where that shows someone open this in a new tab so if I'm right here and I click on theme details that's this here the name by the author name the link in this little bit of text here that's what it's give me an option to change here so if you want to you can change it or just leave the same I say just leave it the same okay summer scroll down a little bit here now here's what you want to do you want to check on this box and so right here saying copy menus widgets and other customizer settings from the parent theme to the child theme this one option here makes this a very smooth process so then go ahead and click on create new child theme and it really only takes a second and now we have all these different options here so I want to come back to this plug-in so let's now go to appearance in the and themes in your to see here's my parent theme but here is that new child theme and then I can just go ahead and click on activate and now the child theme is activated and you could see the parent theme there now you can't delete the parent theme it is dependent upon the parenting the parenting needs to be there this is just so you can take your code customizations and you can throw many child theme so everything's upgrade safe let me show you a couple cool more things about this plug-in and what I like about it now a lot of times okay let me actually first go to appearance in the and editor and then let me show you all the files in that parenting so to choose primer click on select so the parent theme has all these files now if you wanted to say customize this theme footer file if you did it in the parent theme it's going to be overwritten when there's another update so now the thing is why we've got this great child theme now how do we actually take this footer theme footer file and make a copy that is in the child theme now for me it's easy I know exactly how to log into the file systems in duplicate and move and do all that stuff but it might be a little bit of the geeky nerdy things so it's not so non-techies gets old techie at that point but that that child theme creator plug-in makes this process easy so I can go to tools and go back into the plug in settings right here and I can choose right here were excessive files and so here's all the files in my parent theme I can click on any file I want and it will make a copy of it in the child theme and then I can go in and change any code I want so for me I'm I want to take that footer file solid click right there and then click copy to the child theme and it made a copy of it and now if I wanted to customize that file I could go to appearance and then editor and here is a theme footer that file and it's right there now it's copied into the child theme and it's super easy to make any code modification that you want you want to add a theme function you could do right here if you wanted to add some kind of stylesheet you could do it here now here's the deal you might go into creating a website they cannot never get to change anything to change the code I met to change the style I don't know how to do that nor do I think of the need to do it let me tell you your to find out that when you have a website for little while. I find not want to change that let me ask the maker of that plug-in and the maker of the plug is good come back and say he take this custom function and put in your functions file and and that's when you realize that you need a child theme and so that's where you can come in here inputted in this theme functions file and have it all be upgrade safe you doing any e-commerce with the plug-in WooCommerce you're gonna need some custom functions to be able to do the custom things that you want to do and if there's any aspect of your website that you might want to be different color in the theme developer doesn't make it easy while that's can it be custom code it's actually not that complicated but the reason you have a child theme so that you have it in their in an upgrade safe manner a before you go I have something for you and before I get into that I wanted to ask you to do something for me if you can give me a thumbs up on this video and if you're not a subscriber click on the subscribe button right beneath me if you have a question on this video be happy to answer it you can also leave a comment or question down below this video hey I put together a course just for you Dominic give it to you for free all you have to do is click on the button right here on the right it's called the three steps to WordPress success it's an awesome course you're gonna love it I would love for you to join in and enroll as a student in this course thanks for watching this video I really appreciated and I do it just for you

Channel: WPCrafter.com WordPress For Non-Techies

Views: 159,205

Rating: 4.9461498 out of 5

Keywords: wpcrafter, child theme wordpress tutorial 2015, wordpress child theme tutorial, how to create child theme in wordpress, create child theme, wordpress child theme 2015, create child theme wordpress, how to create a child theme in wordpress 2015, create a child theme in wordpress, wordpress child theme, creating a child theme in wordpress 2015, how to create a child theme in wordpress, wordpress create child theme, create wordpress child theme, child theme wordpress tutorial

Id: cuCs89h3rlU

Length: 10min 33sec (633 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 16 2016