We all know and love the godfather of the child themes movement, Ian Stewart from Themeshaper. Yes, I’m calling him a godfather. He’s constantly advocating the promises and benefits on why you should be using child themes right now to customize your WordPress theme, and he’s right. You should. However, child themes aren’t the end solution to all problems. Child themes aren’t for everyone. Me, personally, I love ‘em. But there are some people who choose to do things the old fashion way. Not everybody likes change. So when I created WP Framework, I didn’t want to lock those people down to only one method of customization.

Let’s be real here. Not everybody knows, has time for, or even cares about child themes outside of the WordPress community. Heck, a lot of people in the community are still boggled out of their minds. I say this because of the clients I deal with (mostly DIYers) get confused when I explain to them in plain english, all the benefits of child themes. I give them analogies that they can relate too, even crack some jokes on previous work I’ve done where child themes could have been really, really handy. What do they do? They still edit the (parent) theme files to get what they want. No matter how hard I try to explain and show them, they still do it there way.

Child themes also add another step to the process of downloading an installing a theme.
To you, super WordPress guru, there’s nothing complicated about downloading a (parent) theme, creating a separate folder within the themes/ directory, create a new styles.css (and maybe functions.php if your a pro at this) within this new folder, add all the meta data about this new child theme and make sure it points back to the parent theme or else it’s not a child theme, then start making your customizations and changes, finally activate this new child theme so you can finally take a look at what you’ve done. Oh yeah, then start blogging. Gosh, it sounds so simple.

What if all I really wanted to do was make a few color changes to this awesome theme I just downloaded… do I really have to go through all that?

What is the root of the problem? Is editing the main theme that troublesome? Do we really have to solely rely on Child themes to make theme customizations? Seems to be, but it doesn’t have to be that way. What’s another way to customize themes without editing the core template files? Let’s take a little walk on over to Diythemes.

Thesis, a premium WordPress theme by Chris Pearson seems to be doing pretty fine with users editing the main thesis theme.
How? Well that lies within the /thesis/custom/ folder. Within that folder, you’ve got two files that we’re going to look at, custom.css and custom_functions.php.

• Custom.css — is where all your CSS styles would go into. You can even overwrite default styles from thesis by applying a .custom selector before each rule.
• Custom_functions.php — is where all your php modifications would go into. Thesis provides a crap load of hooks so you can modify default thesis behavior, or add to it.

I don’t know about you, but that smells awfully similar to what child themes are, but inside the main theme, thus requiring less steps.

Now I’m not trying to say you should drop the whole child themes way of life and that this is the only way to go. It’s just another approach to safe-guarding your customizations and reaping all the benefits of child themes (but within one main theme). You’d might as well call the custom/ folder childtheme/ as it serves the same purpose.

Well what about WP Framework?
What if I told you, the entire root folder is pretty much yours to customize and edit. Yep, that’s right. Your not just locked down to just one directory. Build your theme the way your use to building it, not how I tell you to. And that is the way of the Framework. I just had to get that off my chest.

Speaking of WP Framework, I blame it for my absents of blogging. I’m having too much fun building it. However, rest assure that I’m here and I’m watching…

(Hope you see where I’m coming from, Justin)