How to Create a Child Theme in WordPress?

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April 8th, 2014

Create a directory in your themes directory to hold the child theme. The theme directory is wp-content/themes. You can name the directory without any space as part of the name, and it is common practice to use the name of the parent theme folder with “-child” appended to it. For example, if you are making a child of the twentyfourteen theme, your folder name would be twentyfourteen-child.

In the child theme directory, create a file called style.css. This is the only file required to make a child theme. The style sheet must start with the following lines:

[code]
/*
Theme Name: Twenty Fourteen Child
Theme URI: http://example.com/twenty-fourteen-child/
Description: Twenty Fourteen Child Theme
Author: John Doe
Author URI: http://example.com
Template: twentyfourteen
Version: 1.0.0
Tags: light, dark, two-columns, right-sidebar, responsive-layout, accessibility-ready
Text Domain: twenty-fourteen-child
*/

@import url(“../twentyfourteen/style.css”);

/* =Theme customization starts here
————————————————————– */
[/code]

You can change each of these lines to suit your theme. The only required lines are the Theme Name, and the Template. The Template is the directory name of the parent theme. In this case, the parent theme is the TwentyFourteen theme, so the Template is twentyfourteen, which is the name of the directory where the TwentyFourteen theme resides. If you want to make a child of a theme with the directory name example-theme-name, then you would use Template: example-theme-name.

The child theme’s stylesheet is included after the parent theme’s and styles will therefore override those in the parent theme’s stylesheet.