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 having one already pre-built and transferring it over to your server via FTP as most developers will suggest.
Of course I recommend you learn how to make a child theme from scratch so that you know what goes into it. But truth be told, that’s not how I learned. I had one built for me the first time and then I started to learn how to use it.
And so if you are new at this and want a simple, quick and easy alternative, here it is.
Using Orbisius is by far the easiest way 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.
Here is how you do it step by step.
5 Painless, Codeless, FTPless Steps to Create Your First Child Theme
1. Go to Plugins and select Add New
2. Type in the search form: “Child Theme Creator by Orbisius” and select Install Now
3. Select Activate Plugin
4. Select Create Child Theme
5. Using the parent theme you want to make a child theme, check off the following boxes and then select Create Child Theme
a. Switch theme to the new theme after it is created
b. Create a blank functions.php file
That’s it! In 5 painless steps you have created your first child theme. You can check it out by going to Appearance > Editor where you can begin to make all your customizations.
Now you can even deactivate and uninstall the plug-in because you no longer need it. That’s right. One less plug-in. HA! You are getting good at this WordPress stuff.
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).
Do you still do this in preference to using the EMP child theme maker – https://elegantmarketplace.com/child-theme-maker?
Hello Geno.
Curious, and with regard specifically to Divi, have you had a chance to run DiviChildren through its paces? Beautiful plugin. And free. 😉 Well worth the few minutes of examination.
Thanks for this post as well. 🙂 For many this should be the grail most holy, from the standpoint of never-ever-ever customize a wp site in anything other than a child-theme.
Michael, if I’m not mistaken, Geno is the author of Divi Children… this is odd :O
Actually I am not the author of Divi Children but thanks for the compliment 😉 Although it’s a great resource for many, I personally don’t use Divi Children because with Orbisius, I can easily remove the plugin as soon as the child theme is created and it does not leave anything left behind except the blank child theme files. 🙂