Okay, I quite often see people talk about child themes and the reasons for using them instead of modifying the existing theme, but they all seem to center around the idea that if the parent theme is updated all changes will be lost. When I’ve created sites in the past, I have always made a duplicate of the starting theme, changed the theme name in style.css, and worked directly there. It seems to me that using a single theme instead of a child theme would save overhead, and allow greater control over the code – removing unnecessary functions rather than working around them, for example. If I run into issues, I always have the original theme files to reference, and if the parent theme is updated, my child theme could still break anyway if function names and such change, so I don’t see that as a real benefit.
My web searches haven’t turned up much on this topic save “developer preference”, which is not really a reason.
Are there any real benefits of using a child theme over duplicating and renaming the theme?
3 s
Child Themes are useful for users who mainly want to make style changes to their Theme, but don’t want – or know how – to maintain the underlying code. Grokking PHP/WordPress Theme Development is an entirely different thing than grokking CSS.
Child Themes are also useful for users who want to implement minor functional changes to their Theme. This is especially useful for Themes that provide a lot of means for modification: action/filter hooks, pluggable functions, etc. Granted, such mods could just as easily be implemented via custom Plugin, but such a Plugin would only apply if the correct Theme is active, so it makes just as much sense to put this code in a Child Theme.
If you’re comfortable with maintaining a forked Theme, and find that your modifications exceed what would be reasonable for a Child Theme, then by all means: fork the Theme.
It all boils down to the method that is most beneficial to the individual end user.
