One of my favorite tools when building a website is Orbisius Child Theme Creator. Sure there are many ways to create a child theme including just transferring a pre-built child theme over to your hosting server via FTP as most developers will suggest. But if you want a simple, quick and easy plug-in alternative, here it is.
Using Orbisius is by far the simplest plug-in to create a child theme with very little effort. You literally just install the plug-in, activate it, choose the parent theme, create the child theme, deactivate and remove the plugin and your done. You are not left with an extra plug-in, any residual plug-in files or broken sites.
Now if you want a little more bells and whistles you can try something like Divi Children by Luis Alejandro which is great but it is also intended to remain installed and activated for all its features to work. With Orbisius, you can easily remove it when you are done.
Child Theme Creator Features
- Create a theme with a click of a button
- Never forget what files to copy and what to skip when creating child themes.
- Easy to use interface
- When moving through the themes the current one will have a nice background & border
- Create unlimited child themes from a parent theme. The plugin will add Child 01, Child 02 etc.
- Edit theme files with our two theme editors.
- Automatically creates rtl.css if it exists in the parent theme
- The plugin uses minified css/js to make sure it loads quicker.
This plugin allows you to quickly edit theme files from Appearance > Orbisius Theme Editor (entry added by the same plugin) It features two editors and you can pick snippets from one theme and paste into another.
Theme Editor Features
- Edit two theme files at the same time
- Ajax -> No page refresh
- Easy to use interface
- Supports WordPress Multisite
- Create a New File (+ checks if the file exists)
- Delete file with no residual plug-in files left behind
The bottom line is, if you do not use FTP and/or have not created child themes manually in the past, then there is no easier way to get started than by using Orbisius Child Theme Creator.
If you are interested in a step by step tutorial, check out my tutorial…
5 Painless, Codeless, FTPless Steps to Create Your First Child Theme
Well that’s all for now. I hope you find this article useful.
He also enjoys all things design, traveling, hanging out with friends, encouraging other believers, experimenting with new technologies, and adding more monitors to his desktop workstation (currently at 5).
Great write up Geno and based on post, used it on one of my sites.
Very easy to install and so far, so good. Would love to read more about integrating other files/folders that may be modified without fear of being overridden when updated eg. Woocommerce.
Thanks for taking the time.
Thanks Kolonel. Glad you found it useful 😀
Orbisius is a great plugin, it saves a lot of time when the subject is creating a child theme. But, the style.css that it creates seems not to work. I tried to put CSS changes in there and it didn’t work. When I put the CSS code into the CSS Custom box at ePanel, it works.
There are certain elements that are generated on the html page based on the WP Customizer Settings and some Javascript. Usually only a handful of elements like font colors in the header and footer (if the customizer has been used to generate other colors). But this is going to be the case whether you used Orbisius to create your child theme’s stylesheet.css or any other plugin. Even if you created it manually, you will have to change those elements in the Custom CSS box or change the customizer settings back to default.