Hello all,
I know there were some discussions about child themes and that Chris S is against child themes… but I never got a clear answer to the question: do I really need child theme?
Let me explain my situation: I have two websites running Newsmag with child themes. In the next few days and weeks I’ll launch two more websites (one with Newsmag, another perhaps with Newspaper – but I think it doesn’t matter, right?). Since shortly I’ll be running 4 sites, I want to make my life a bit easier by – unifying them. So my questions for you would be:
1. To continue using child themes or not? i.e. should I use child themes on new websites?
2. If you think I should abandon child themes, what is the proper procedure for new website installation? Just forgive child theme and use Newsmag as the only one or? And more important question, what to do with existing websites? If I just delete child theme, what would happen? Should I do something more than just deactivate child teme?
Chris S, I’m dying to hear your thoughts… 🙂 and others opinions too!
Regards,
Plamenko
Heh …. well, the short version would be … just install the main theme, don’t use child theme at all; don’t even upload it. (I don’t use child themes on ANY of our sites or client sites.) So, this way you have one set of things to optimize, manually minify, one set of functions, css, etc.
Just keep track of snippets with a map of which files/customizations you do. SO, when there is theme update you can paste in your functions.php changes into new file, for example; or if you mod the main style.css – make not of what you changed (e.g., search/replace default fonts). Use a good text editor with line numbering — so, you keep track of “I edited the hook at line 55 in file /theme/includes/td-whattheheck.php” etc.
Faster – no CSS redirect from child to parent; no mix of files, smaller to do backup of your site via FTP, blah blah blah.
So – that was short version. Long version would contain a lot of other commentary you don’t need to hear from me on this topic 😉
