Frequenting the WordPress support forum always makes wonder a lot of things. The biggest one, I hate to admit, is do people read. I know it does come off a little mean, rude but the truth is a lot of the threads that are in the forums could easily be avoided. The number one being how to modify a specific theme.

The forums are filled with a few of these but the biggest mistakes is that people don’t really read. I want to say part of that reason is the welcome page to the forums. Don’t get me wrong I can find my way quite easily since first starting over a year ago but for a first timer you will want to look elsewhere.

The thing that people want to be able to do is modify a theme or alter it to make it their own. The best way to do this is by creating a child theme. The codex has a good quick and simple tutorial and then gets a little more detailed about how child themes function.

I’ll break things down into steps. Why? Because that’s how most of us read and follow directions, right?

  1. Create empty folder
  2. Create style.css
  3. Active

Create an empty folder

One of the first things to do is create a folder. It really doesn’t matter what you name the folder. 

Create a new folder
Create a new folder

I chose twentysumchild for demonstration purposes but it really could be anything you want. In that folder we will then create a new file. It will be the main file for our child theme. Can you guess the name? Yep,

style.css

will be the newly created file.

Create style.css

Pick any text editor and you will add the needed format so WordPress knows what to do and how to interact with our newly created theme. In our randomly named folder we will now have a single file called: style.css

In this file we will add the CSS header information so that WordPress will show it on our Themes selection page.

Sample information for style.css
Sample information for style.css

As you can see I chose to name my child theme ‘My Randmoizer’ but really it can be anything you want it to be. The key to making the child theme is actually the keyword “Template.” It sounds a little odd but it is true. If you for some reason get a message that there is a template file missing it may be due to that missing line of code.

Now all that is left is to activate the theme.

Activate

Child theme activated
Child theme activated

I didn’t use a screenshot only because I didn’t have much time and I got a little lazy towards the end. A good size for one is 600 pixels by 450 pixels.

As you can see I chose to base my child theme on Twenty-Thirteen but you can create a child theme from just about any theme. Just don’t forget that the key word is: Template

So go, explore, tweak and hack away to your heart’s content. Make as many changes as you want knowing that you will not lose any changes when that theme gets updated.