I have found and downloaded a theme. However I want to tweak the CSS some to change the design, colours etc. a bit. How should I go about doing this, while still being able to update the theme without loosing the changes.
While you can’t modify it without changing it, you can isolate the parts you change by creating a Child Theme. In summary:
- Create a theme directory on peer with your “parent” theme,
- Create a
style.css
file in your new directory that has aTemplate:
declaration in the comments naming your parent theme and an@import url(../%parent-theme%/style.css)
to import the CSS from the parent theme, - Activate your new theme in the WordPress admin console,
- Add new files and/or copy files from your parent theme directory to your child theme directory and modify them to your preference, and
- That’s it!
I could give you lots more details but basically this guy does a really good job of explaining How to Create a Child Theme so better for me just to point you to it.
When you want to upgrade the parent theme just upgrade; it will leave your child theme in-tact. Of course your child theme may not work perfectly if they’ve changed the parent too much and/or if you copied and modified theme files they updated in the new version you won’t get the new functionality without modifying them too, but it’s a lot better from starting over each time!
Hope that helps.