Ahmad Awais
“I found out there was no child theme included. Dang! Now I have to create one!”
This is how we all sound when we have to create a child theme. There is really no rocket science to the process of creating child themes, but as a front-end fanatic, I always look for the best practices.
Today when I had to create a child theme, I thought of creating a boilerplate first, by DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) philosophy. So, there you go, a WordPress child theme boilerplate was born, and the only parent (me) chose to call it _child.
There are only two files in _child. Which are
Inside _child’s style.css, there is nothing but a comment for WP to read it as a theme. At line #7 there is a template tag, which you need to replace with the folder’s name of your parent theme.
This file is a bit interesting. There’s a function called aa_enqueue_styles() which is responsible for enqueuing two style sheets.
If you have any questions, let me know.
It lives at GitHub under a tree called GPL license. Start it, fork it. Pull requests are welcomed!
Download v1.0.0 — Star or Fork
P.S. _child is an open-source theme, which means anyone can send pull requests to enhance it and make it better. My friend Matt Cromwell recently contributed to _child in the form of a branch called cleanup, _child in this branch dequeues and deregisters parent theme’s sidebars, widgets, post_types, and scripts (JS & CSS). Thus the name is cleanup.
P.P.S. A few beginner developers requested this gif on how to clone the _child boilerplate.
Founder & CEO of ⌘ Command Code, the most used coding agent for open models: 160K+ users, 50K+ paying customers. Founded Langbase (AI cloud for agents with memory & tools).
"What an awesome example for developers." — Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, on my NASA Ingenuity code.
NASA Ingenuity Mars Helicopter code contributor · 6× GitHub Star, one of the first 8 Gold Stars · #1 trending JavaScript developer on GitHub · 6× Google Developer Expert · 6× Microsoft MVP.
Ex VP DevRel & DevTools at RapidAPI · Google Developers Advisory Board (gDAB) founding member · OpenAPI Business Governing Board, Linux Foundation · SF DevNetwork AI/ML Advisory Board · Angel investor (Replit, Resend, Daytona, Gumroad and you?).
Award-winning open source engineering leader: 300+ projects, 50–100M downloads a year, including Shades of Purple (5M+ developers) and corona-cli (10B+ queries).
Taught 217K+ developers via NodeCLI.com and VSCode.pro. 160+ talks. Blogging since 2000, billions of views.
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Ahmad Awais
Thanks for the post.
Q. What if I have made tons of changes (that go way beyond style.css) in my theme without making a child theme? Now the developer is offering an update because its a premium theme but I can’t do it.
Any solution other than doing the whole stuff again.
Nope there is no solution, except fo you stripping out those changes and making them work with a child theme.