There are hundreds of themes available for the world’s most popular blogging content management system, and the theme dictates the entire look and feel of your website as well as how users interact with it. However, if you want to more easily add functionality to a theme, you can install a child theme. Child themes inherit the functionality of the parent theme without making extensive changes to the appearance of your website. This provides a safe and easy way to modify the main theme you have activated on your blog. The functionality specific to the installed child theme will then override the functions of the parent theme without requiring you to manually make extensive changes to the source code.
- In your administrator dashboard, navigate to Appearance > Themes and click on “Upload”. Download the theme you want to use as the parent theme from wordpress.org or whichever other website it is hosted on. Ensure that you choose a theme which is suitable for using with child themes, such as Genesis. Browse for the ZIP file and click “Install Now”. Do not activate the theme once it has been installed. Alternatively, try searching for your preferred theme using the Search rather than the upload function.
- Repeat the above process for your chosen child theme, using a theme which is compatible with the parent theme. For example, for the Genesis Framework, there are many available child themes available.
- Return to the Themes page to see a preview of all available themes installed on your WordPress blog. Simply mouse over the child theme of your choice and click “Activate”. The changes will take place immediately.
In order for both themes to work together, you only need to activate the child theme. The parent theme simply needs to stay located in the themes directory of your WordPress installation. If you prefer to manually install the parent and child themes, you can do so by extracting the contents of the ZIP files into the /wp-content/themes directory of your WordPress installation. You will need an FTP client, such as FileZilla or Core FTP for this, although most hosting providers have their own Web-based FTP clients as well.