WordPress® All-in-One For Dummies®

Modifying Theme Structure with Child Themes

The preceding section showed how to use a child theme to modify the stylesheet of an existing theme. This is tremendously powerful. A talented CSS developer can use this technique to create an amazing variety of layouts and designs.

However, this is just the beginning of the power of child themes. Although every child theme overrides the parent theme's style.css file, the child theme can override the parent theme's template files, too. However, child themes aren't limited to just overriding template files; when needed, child theme's can also supply their own template files.

Template files are PHP files that WordPress runs to render different views of the site. A site view is the type of content being looked at. Examples of different views are home, category archive, individual post, and page content.

Some examples of common template files are index.php, archive.php, single.php, page.php, attachment.php, and search.php. (You can read more about available template files, including how to use them, in Chapter 3 of this minibook.)

You might wonder what purpose modifying template files of a parent theme serves. Although modifying the stylesheet of a parent theme can allow for some very powerful control over the design, it can't add new content, modify the underlying site structure, or change how the theme functions. To get that level of control, you need to modify the template files.

Overriding parent template files

When both the child theme ...