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Learn how to customize your WordPress site with child themes.
Learning how to create a child theme is the first step to becoming a WordPress developer. Child themes are a great entry point, as theyâre built on top of an existing theme with a properly coded foundation. The skills you use during development are the same ones you leverage for writing brand-new themes and plugins. Learn how to use child themes to create your own custom, stylish new WordPress sitesâwithout the advanced knowledge of a web developer. Instructor Patrick Rauland explains how to get started picking a parent theme, updating the CSS, creating a new template for your child theme, and updating its functionality. By the end of this practical, project-based course, you should have a functioning child theme and the skills to quickly customize your next WordPress site.
Overview
Syllabus
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Introduction
- Level up to WordPress developer
- What you need to know
- Using the exercise files
- Set up a local development environment
- Set up a code editor
- Use real content
- What is a child theme?
- Picking a parent theme
- Creating and activating a child theme
- Including stylesheets
- Best practices for including stylesheets
- Employing the laziness principle
- Designing in the browser
- Modify existing styles
- Add new styles
- Challenge: Add flair
- Solution: Add flair
- Understanding functions.php
- Finding functions in the parent theme
- Modify a pluggable function
- Hooks, filters, and action
- Filter a function
- Hooking functions
- Challenge: Change posted by
- Solution: Change posted by
- Template hierarchy in WordPress
- Changing an existing template
- Add new template files
- Managing backward compatibility
- Challenge: Custom 404 page
- Solution: Custom 404 page
- Finding existing functionality
- Add a menu
- Change menu output with properties
- Style new menu with CSS
- Challenge: Conditional widgetized area
- Solution: Conditional widgetized area
- Shiny new web fonts
- Adding a screenshot
- Migrating files to your live site
- Next steps
