It’s no secret that I love using WordPress and love design. Those are pretty obvious if you’ve known me for some time. I guess you could say I’m a little addicted to WordPress. My digital meth if you will, but I also love design about the same.

Working on WordPress themes is an amazing middle ground for me. It’s almost a zen state for me when I’m looking at a design and trying to figure out how to code the theme. Some themes require a little more TLC than others. A great example is when you have to think about the end user. As some may, or may not, know I like to help out in the WordPress.org support forums when I can.

I’ve even written a post about creating a child theme. Yes, I do encourage that in the forums as well if you want to make any modifications to any theme. The downside is that often times some themes don’t generally like to use: get_stylesheet_directory_uri()

Dilemma

Now, there are two things to remember when it comes to working with child themes.

  1. Use them
  2. Code properly for them

What I mean by number two is that you should be using the right function when it comes to enqueuing the stylesheets and scripts. In this case I’ll be talking about stylesheets.

A few days ago I was typing out some code for my theme and started to think about the structure of my folders. The most commonly used in themes seems to be to have all the CSS files bundled together and all the JavaScript files together as well. Simple and makes sense really. The downside is when some people use a stylesheet that resides in that folder. It does seem a little odd but it will all make sense in a bit.

The issue is when a parent theme uses the rule

@import url( 'path/to/stylesheet.css' );

in the main stylesheet. What that means is that the user now has to look for the location of the main stylesheet and create the right code for it. Or better yet have to include the

@import url( '../path/to/parent/stylesheet.css' );

rule in the child theme.

Why not make it a little easier for them?

How?

By using a quick conditional check to see if the current theme is a parent theme or a child. Yes, there is a function for it. Believe or not it is actually:

is_child_theme()

Simple little function that checks to see if the stylesheet path and the template path are the same; if they are then it is a parent theme, otherwise it is a child. Quick and painless, right?

But how to use it to our advantage? Easy. When we register our scripts and styles we add on the little conditional and when it is a child theme we use both the child’s stylesheet as well as the one being used by the parent.

if ( is_child_theme() ){
    wp_enqueue_style( 'parent-style', get_template_directory_uri() . '/css/mite.css' );
    wp_enqueue_style( 'child-style', get_stylesheet_uri() );
} else {
    wp_enqueue_style( 'parent-style', get_stylesheet_uri() );
}

You’ll notice that I am using two different functions when it is a child theme to enqueue the stylesheets being used.

The main reason for this is that when the function

get_stylesheet_uri()

is used it will get the location of the stylesheet of the active theme. We don’t always want that because if you are the a developer that likes to group their files accordingly then it may just lead to a little trouble.

With that little snippet you can now rest assured that when you activate the theme it will load the right path. Now in order for all of this to work we just add one minor thing to our style.css file:

@import url( ../css/theme-style.css );

Fairly straight forward, right?