WordPress Child Themes – Your Gateway to theme development paradise

Child themes are a fairly new concept. I’ve been hearing about them for some time now. Never really bothered to check out before. But luckily for all of us, I have now. This is not complicated. This is somewhat easy to understand . So don’t fret about all the lingo.

Basically, you create themes that rely on other themes as templates. Now that it turn means you only have to change the child theme to make changes to your WordPress theme .

So why bother you ask ?

As it turns out what most wordpress theme designers do is build on top of existing themes they like. I’m guilty of that myself. Why write everything from the beginning when you might need only a few things changed. For example Serving Niches itself it built on themeorrhea by JTK. I loved the way his theme was built. It was simple and didn’t have too many files cluttering up the back end.

The basic layout for any theme doesn’t have to be different. Now previous to WordPress 2.7 I would have had to change the theme files using editor and add my embelishments. Everytime a new version of the theme was released , I would have had to copy paste all my changes to the new theme. Almost rewrite the whole thing. If you had seen the serving niches theme files , you wouldn’t recognize themeorrhea. There were way too many changes made. So imagine having to write all that again on top of the new theme. It would take time.

See now I don’t have to do that. Now with the concept of child themes , I could simply put all my changes in its own folder , so when I upload a new version of the original theme , I’ll only be rewriting the theme’s files not my changes.

So how do you make use of child themes ?

Child themes are put in the same folder as any other theme on your wordpress installation.

wp-content/themes

To build a child theme , you will first need a mother theme or a main theme to build a child theme on.

All you need to do is to make changes to the style.css file . You need it to tell wordpress that this theme is a child theme.

Neat huh ? Imagine all those hours you’d have to spend rewriting and testing and playing and rehashing and indenting and what not all that code if you were to update the mother theme.

The mother theme style.css. Below is the beginning of a typical style.css .

/*





Theme Name: Your Theme Name

Theme URI: http://your-theme-homepage.com

Description: Oh what a lovely description of your theme you'll put here!

Author: Your Name

Author URI: http://your-website.com

Template: If this is a child theme, you'll set the template theme's folder name here,   otherwise don't put this here

Version: A version number

.

Any general information, license statements, plugin requirements, or any other information you

may want to share.

.

*/

You do need to make a few changes to the child theme’s style.css . The one file it needs is style.css . You need to put the basic information below in it. Below is an example of how you’d want to fill out the child theme style.css file.

Theme Name: will the child theme’s name

Theme URL: url of your theme if you choose to upload it somewhere so that people can download or purchase it

Description: small description of the child theme

Author: your name or nick name

Author URL: if you have a website. Get a free one atleast mate if you don’t have one.

Template: This is the important option. This is where you mention the location of the mother theme. So say the mother theme is located in wp-content/themes/themeorrhea/ .

You’d write “themeorrhea” here. So it would be Template: themeorrhea .

Version: this is you first child theme ? Call it version 1.0 . you could call it 10.0 if you wanted. It doesn’t really matter.

An example of what a child theme’s style.css would look like.



/*

Theme Name: Sandwich

Theme URI: http://anupvasudevan.com/sandwich

Description: This is Sandwich, a child theme for themeoreaa.

Author: Anup

Author URI: <a href="http://thor/">http://</a>anupvasudevan.com

Template: themeoreaa

Version: 1.0

.

You need to have both Sandwich and Themeorrhea in your wp-content/themes/ folder for this

theme to work.

.

*/

This child theme will be like any other theme . You’ll be able to activate it like any other theme from the Appearance page in wordpress admin .

So what about the remaining files ?

Simply add them to the child theme folder. The child theme’s files get precedence by default over the mother theme’s files. In other words, should you add a header.php to the sandwich folder at wp-content/themes/sandwich , it will be chosen over themeorrhea’s header.php . Thereby replacing it. The rest of the files will be used as is. If you choose to use the mother theme’s files , do not make an empty file in the child theme folder.

That is all . There you’ve made it to the end.

You should be able to use child themes on WordPress installation now.

An example use of this would be during the holiday season. You want to change the look for maybe December 25th alone or even the week leading up to December 25th .

This way you don’t have to write the code all over . You just need to build a child theme. Maybe just change the background image to something with leaves and bells.

You are limited only by your imagination.

image credits : http://www.flickr.com/photos/iamperegrino/2913018697/ WordPress stickers & stationery
http://www.flickr.com/photos/myklroventine-events/3832855830/ WordPress screen

lynda.com could possibly be the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Rarely does anything get me this excited. No hype people.

For one there are courses similar to the ones on this site I’ve bought for $197 . The $197 courses were rubbish compared to this. This site is a treasure chest of information. In fact its so good you’d probably increase your income by thousands should you apply it. Make no mistake . This is not a sales pitch.

Before you start thinking this as one of those sleazy internet marketing websites (okay okay sheesh lol ) , I would like to assure you it isn’t. The best part is that you could gain access to this treasure chest for $25.

A few of the Courses that you will be getting –

Social Media Marketing with Facebook and Twitter

Google Analytics Essential Training

SEO: Search Engine Optimization Getting Started

Search Engine Optimization (2006)

Flash CS4 Professional: Building Search Engine Friendly Sites

Blogging  : Self-Hosting a WordPress Site

Ecommerce : Product Photography for E-Commerce

and much much more

Imagine every popular web technology explained and you get an idea of what’s available on lynda.com

Click on the Image Below to go there.

<strong>Few others who use lynda.com</strong>

Imitating what works is a Good Idea .

As always
Have fun People

Using RSS Feeds to write posts on your WordPress Blog.

Hello. Its been ages since I last posted. For those of you wondering why that is, all I can say is Mom , India, No Internet Access, Hospital , everything’s okay. Moving on ….

This is ridiculously Easy. Don’t worry about it too much . A site filled with some original content and RSS feed content isn’t going to have any problems.

You can do this only if you have a WordPress Blog. You don’t need one that hosted somewhere. One on WordPress.com should do.

First you need to download FeedWordPress plug in.

Click here to download FeedWordPress Plugin for wordpress

For more detailed info on the plug in itself or the makers. Visit http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/

OR

login to your wordpress administartion area. Choose plugins and click on add new. Under the search tab in the empty field ,type feedwordpress. its the first one that turns up. install and activate the plug in. If you’re asked to Update Magpie RSS please do so.

You should now see a tab called Syndication in the administration area.

Congratulations ! You’ve successfully downloaded and activated the Plug In.

Here’s the wonderful part that not everyone knows. So we need good and useful Feeds to put on our Blog. Fret not. Finding them isn’t as hard as it sounds. These days they’re basically everywhere.

For the sake of keeping this Post short and not driving you nuts, we’re only going to discuss a few sites you can use to get RSS Feeds. You know them, you’ve already heard of them and have probably used them. Just not this way. You’ll know more than enough to do this by yourself at the end of this article on any site that provides this feature.

Example using Digg –

Digg  ( http://www.digg.com/search)

this should take you to the Digg Search Page. On the search page choose all. Search for your choice of keywords until you are happy with what you see.

What we’re going to do is save the RSS Feed of the Search result. What this does is that everytime a new result or new news item or video or article gets added to Digg, you get updated automatically.

Save the RSS feed for this search by right clicking on the orange RSS icon in the top right and click “Copy Link Location”. This link is your content specific RSS Feed.

Basically you can do this on a lot of sites. Technorati, google blog search , youtube, PRWeb, Yahoo News! etc.

We’re not done yet. So after clicking on “Copy Link Location”. Go to the Administration Area of your WordPress Blog. Click on the Syndication Tab. On the right , you should see “Add new source” . Paste the link location in the field provided and click on Syndicate. If the whole thing was successful , you should see a button saying “Use this feed” . Click on it. It should now be added under syndicated sources. Click on the box next to it and click Update Checked. You should have a few posts waiting for you.

Should you wish to review the posts before anything gets posted, click on posts under syndication. Choose the option you prefer and you should be done.

And that’s all there is to it.

Have Fun with It.

See you soon !

Never let Fear or Doubt enter your mind. There is nothing you need to succeed except the power of your own mind.

– Andreas Ohrt ( www.MindPowerNews.com )

Congratulations ! You have made it to Part Two . What I’m discussing can be used to make any page. You don’t have to be designing Squeeze Pages alone with it. Starting from where we left off.

So we were discussing a favourite page of mine. Now I’d like to use it . All I have to do is Save it to my computer and then open it in Kompozer.

To see it click here. <- This leads to the readme.html wordpress page. I’m using it as an example.

Save it to your computer if you haven’t. Just to better understand the example. Hopefully you’ve downloaded KompoZer. If you haven’t its Free and you’ll need it. Download it here.

Now a lot of squeeze pages and sales pages we come across in Internet Marketing have that border like in the wordpress readme page. A lot of things like font size of the headings , the paragraph size are coded into a .css file.

Don’t worry its not going to get too complicated. Atleast not super duper complicated.

A lot of times there are things you’d have to repeat. Eg. You’d want your heading to be huge. You’d want a sub heading to be another font and slightly less that the 1st heading. Instead of coding all this stuff over and over when the need arises, they put that stuff into a .css file. The reason I mention this is because almost all squeeze pages and sales pages I’ve come across have this. So you’d have to get the .css file as well. If you chose Webpage Complete when saving the Page, you shouldn’t have any problems.

Now here is the Brain Dead part. Instead of writing a whole Sales Page or Squeeze Page, I’ll be copy pasting from another popular awesome Page. I’m doing this only as an example and am not suggesting you literally rip off stuff word for word. It merely makes it easier to explain and understand.

The above is a snapshot of what I’ve done with it . This is only an example. You can view it here. I’ve left some parts of the original wordpress readme page and Copy pasted stuff from Jeff Johnson’s Underground Training Lab. I did this merely to show you. I wouldn’t leave the WordPress logo up there if I were to actually use it , but you get the Point.

There’s not much to explain in terms of using it. All you have to do is edit it in KompoZer  ,add the form and do what you want to the page.

When Uploading it into your hosting account, you will have to upload the .css file. If you had saved the page correctly you should a folder saying “name_files”. Where name refers to name of the webpage you just saved. When uploading you will need to upload that folder.

Well actually you won’t need everything in the folder. The folder probably contains the logo and other images. It will also include a .css file  . The reason I’m asking you to upload the whole folder is because in the webpage has a link to the .css file. The css file tells the page what to look like and what fonts to use etc. Uploading the whole folder is easier on the Brain.

NOTE – The folder won’t automatically be uploaded when you upload the page to your hosting account. That is why you are doing this in the first place.

You may remove the images from the folder you won’t use. Leave the .css file and anything else you need . Then upload the folder. That should work fine too.

You can get some really good looking results this way.

As always

Have a Great Day !