Getting started with Thematic child themes – Part 1

If you haven’t heard of WordPress child themes you’ve either been buried under a rock somewhere or, like me, you just don’t keep up with the WordPress developer buzz as well as you should.  Either way, child themes are about to revolutionize the way we develop for WordPress.

Basically put, a child theme is a template that inherits all of the styles and functions of its parent theme.  This allows you to modify a theme to your liking without ever mucking around in the original authors source code (unless you want to) and your changes will not be modified even if a newer version of that heme becomes available.

The bonus here is simplicity and continuity.  you can change a compatible theme until theme unil the cows come home and upgrade to the newest version with the newest, coolest options without ever losing the changes you’ve made to the theme.  For those of us that regularly change header code to point to feedburner feeds or custom trackers this is a mystical and magical thing.

I could spend weeks explaining the details and setting up a parent theme for your perusal, but the work has already been done for us, so let’s start with what’s already working, and working well.

Enter the Thematic Theme Foundation, a parent theme that has all the features any serious blog developer could ever imagine all in one place and just itching to be modified.  Not only is the framework ready to go as it comes, but it ships with a sample child theme, several different default layout files and a ton of other goodies.

We could easily start with the default child theme, but Devin from WordPress Theming has done a lot of our work for us in terms of adding some useful features to thematic with his very own child theme framework that incorporates an options panel and some neat code bites, so why not just start with his example and expand it?

To follow along over the next few days, you’ll need to install both the Thematic Theme Foundation and Devin’s Example Framework.  Both are installed just like normal WordPress themes, but we won’t be working with either directly.

*Note: You’ll probably want to install these themes on a sandbox or development version of WordPress, as thematic is not very visually appealing out of the box.

In the next installment I’ll walk you through a closer look at what Thematic is and how it works, as well as taking a look at what Devin has already done for us in terms of getting options wothy of any premium theme in place. (We all like theme options, don’t we?)  thematic has an awful lot going on, so we’ll have to get a bit technical in the beginning if we want to have a hope of making changes that work the way we’d like them to.

From there we’ll get started modifying the thing to be something far more visually stimulating than we started off with. We’ll put the full power of Thematic’s 13 Widget aware areas to use and tweak the design and layout into something resembling a pro-blogger theme.

If there are any particular topics you’d like me to cover, feel free to leave them in the comments.  I’m just digging into thematic as well, so your interests could help this tutorial move in a direction that’s more useful for all of us.

Until tomorrow;

Peace. I’m out.

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