Aug 22, 2008

For those of you who like to make and edit Wordpress themes, this bit of information on how to keep your theme upgradeable is extremely cool.

While many people like to make Wordpress themes from scratch, one of the best ways to get the most bang for your buck is to use someone elses hard labor to your own benefit.  There are a ton of talented theme developers out there, and if you are going to use a classic three column design, why would you want to start from scratch.  Lots of great themes exist in the open source realm that make excellent starting blocks for your own work.

There is a bit of a problem though - the theme that you are basing your work off of is likely still changing and getting better.  How can you base your own theme on another, and still be able to seamlessly upgrade the base theme without having to do much work on your own?  Use a Child Theme, thats how!

Simply by adding the following line:

Template: **name of base theme here**

to the header of your style.css file, you can use all of the files of the base theme, and simply have whatever you put in the child theme override the styles, etc. of the base theme.

For more information, check out this article on ThemeShaper.

Wordpress, Wordpress Theme, Themes