It was my understanding that with just that one line in the new style.css file it should look exactly like the parent theme.
No, that’s not correct – review:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes
Thank you for your response. Yes, that is in fact what I used as a guide (although a couple other guides referenced from that page said the same thing). I might not have described completely enough what I did:
1. I created a new “mosaic-child” directory under “themes”.
2. In that directory I created a new style.css file.
3. I added the comment section, as described in the codex, at the top of the file–particularly the line “Template: mosaic”
4. I added the @import url("../mosaic/style.css"); line as the only other line in the file after that, and saved the file.
5. The new theme showed up in Manage Themes, and as I mentioned, it looks perfect when I do “Live Preview”.
6. However, when I actually activate it, much of the styling is missing, as I described above.
If you can point out any steps I missed, it would be much appreciated, as I tried to be very careful in following the instructions completely.
Thank you.
I’d need to see a link to the site for further troubleshooting.
Here’s a link to the site, with the ‘mosaic-child’ theme activated:
http://www.satoshispeaks.com/
Here is an example of what the styling is supposed to look like:
http://demo.wildweblab.com/mosaic/
(although I don’t have the menu enabled currently)
Thank you again for your assistance.
You’ll need to turn off caching and minify – which may also be related to this issue.
Thank you. By turning off minify only it looks correct now. Do you believe that means that minify is not compatible with child themes?
No, it means that you should not use caching/minify while you are making changes to your site.
That makes sense. However, I don’t know if that completely explains this issue. If I turn off minify and clear the caches, it looks good. However, if I then turn back on minify and once again clear the caches (without making any other changes — let’s say that was all I wanted to do and wanted to keep it like this), the styling issue comes back. It would seem that unless something else is going on, then at the least there’s an incompatibility between minify and using a child for this particular theme.
Thank you again for your continued support and follow-ups.
If you’re using W3 Total Cache, try change “Performance > Minify > CSS” “@import handling” to Process
