Twenty Eleven – creating a child theme after the fact

  • webweaverToo

    (@webweavertoo)


    12 years, 3 months ago

    I’ve spent 100+ hours adapting Twenty Eleven to reflect the design I wanted for our Wellington Batucada website http://batucada.org.nz/ and it’s only now that I realise I really shouldn’t have been hacking at the original theme – I should have made a child them and worked on that instead. Doh!

    It’s not just the stylesheet that I’ve made changes to – I’ve hacked away at all sorts of files – not all of which I can now recall. Aargh.

    I’ll be OK following the WordPress instructions on how to create a child theme, but I wanted to get an overview of the relationship between parent and child themes before I start.

    I know I’ve altered, for example, header.php, footer.php, probably functions.php as well as style.css (and there are probably others I’ve forgotten) – plus I’ve made changes to various files within some of the plugins I’ve installed.

    I’d like some advice on the best way to go about creating the child theme – considering that I’ve made so many changes to so many files.

    Would it be best to copy all of the files inside themes/twentyeleven and put those into the child folder (just in case I’ve changed them) and then re-load a virgin copy of twentyeleven to use as the (unchanged) base theme?

    Will files other than style.css work properly from a child theme (will they happily override their parent equivalents) or is there stuff I need to know about various file behaviours before I start?

    Do I need to do the same for any plugin files I have changed, or are they independent of the child/parent thing anyway?

    I want to make the creation of the child theme as painless and quick as possible, and of course I really want to be sure I don’t break the site in the process.

    Hope someone can help. Thanks heaps in advance!

    http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/twentyeleven/

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  • Catrinasgarden

    (@catrinasgarden)

    12 years, 1 month ago

    Hi,

    My bad, I did the same thing. Please help.

    I am using an unusual theme that I really like. Since it was a free theme I thought I would never need to update it. Now I have a multisite and I would like to use different but similar child themes for some of my different sites…so I do need the kids.

    I’m hoping I don’t have to bring my whole site down while I work on this, so this is what I’m thinking of doing. Please tell me if you think this will work of if I am missing something.

    I have made changes to a lot of other php files as well as the style.css and I didn’t keep a log (another thing that I plan to do from here on out).

    I will change my theme on my active site to twenty eleven while I work on this.

    I have already made a folder for my child theme and I understand the code from “making a child theme” that I need to put in the beginning. I will add the @import line for the style sheet. Do I need to add a similar @import line to make it look at the other files?

    I am thinking that I can move my entire revised theme into the child theme folder.

    Next I would up load the unchanged copy of my parent theme into the main folder for that theme. should it be unzipped?

    Then I would change my website back from twenty eleven to my new child theme.

    Can anyone see any problem with this thinking?
    Thank you,
    Catrina

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
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