In the WordPress repository, you can find thousands of themes. Some themes are developed for a spesific usage, and some are so-called “multi-purpose themes”. Astra, which I use on many of my installs, is a multi-purpose theme. After installing a theme you may discover that the theme needs tweeking, either in layout or appearence. Some themes offers ways to change elements on the site through the customizer, others don’t, but the key lesson here is that if you do changes to the theme and the theme later is updated, your changes are lost. That is why we use child themes.
A child theme is a dependent theme that depend upon it’s parents. Every template of the parent theme can be overridden in a child theme, and a well written theme also allows you to change functionality. A child theme consist at the bare minimum of a folder and 1 file; style.css. In the style.css, you override the parent’s style. You may also include a functions.php, where you write all functionality code related to your look’n feel of your site, . In order to make a theme, you need a theme header. A theme header has at least one line of code, the theme name, but often a theme has more information in it’s header. A child theme also has the template definition, which is the folder name of the parent theme’s folder.
/* * Theme name: Here you write the name of your theme * Template: folder-name-of-parent-theme */
There are two ways to create a child theme: by creating the necessary files and folders yourself or by using a child theme generator. There are a handful of those online and Astra provides it’s own.
If you have the required skills, you can develop your own theme. Thie WordPress Codex is a good starting point for theme development.
Customization I have done on this site are many. First of all, I use Elementor (a page builder) and Hello Theme in most of my installs. Hello does not come with any default layouts – you have to build them with Elementor. Due to that, it is not possible to show any before/after customization since there was nothing bofre. Elementor can be used to customize every part of your WordPress website, as individual pages/posts or as templates. In this site, I have customized the header, the footer, the front page and the single post page. There is no need to create a page template since I don’t use pages for any content except the front page.
