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In my previous post, I mentioned that while switching Recipe Mobile to the Mimbo 3.0 theme, I will also implement a child theme right from the beginning.  This process has been going well and I have already realized many of the benefits of using child themes.

What is a child theme?

A child theme typically is a style sheet full of your customizations that you activate in your Wordpress dashboard instead of your regular (parent) theme.  The child theme points to the parent and therefore inherits all the basic functionality of the parent theme but any style customizations made in your child theme override their respective instructions contained in the parent theme.

The reasons that I decided to use a child theme were:

Protection from future theme updates

One of the reasons why I chose the Mimbo theme was that it is being actively developed and new versions are released on a regular basis that offer improvements and compatibility with new versions of Wordpress. 

Previously, every time you installed a new version, you would have to track the changes you have made to the original styling and re-implement them to the new version.  At the very least this is time consuming and can result in several errors.  Using a child theme, you can update the parent theme files and all the style customizations you have made will remain untouched (Since Wordpress 2.7, template files other than style.css can also be overridden, so you can also implement your functionality customizations using child themes)

Ease of customization

Some themes are perfect for your website out of the box requiring very little customization.  Or you might want to implement a theme right away and make minor customizations as you go along.  Very often, we want to test out different colors, sizes, placement etc for objects on a blog and so have to repeatedly make style changes to its corresponding code.  Child themes help you avoid wading through a lot of code every time to reach that particular item that you want to tweak.  All you have to do is copy the style code from the parent theme’s ‘style.css’ file and copy it to your child themes template file and make any customizations there.  This saves time and helps in bug fixing.

Learning how to create and modify themes

Child themes are a perfect way to learn more about Wordpress theme design and styling.  Whether you want to create your own Wordpress themes or just increase your skills in modifying them, you can safely use child themes to try out your wildest designs without breaking your core code.

Implementing temporary style changes

Say you want to give your blog a special look for Easter or any other holiday.  This can easily be done by adding the customizations to a new child theme and activating it for the duration of the period you want.  Then change back to your original parent (or child) theme and you are good to go!

Read on to see how I customized Recipe Mobile using a child theme.  I would love to know about your experience using child themes.

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