As standard your Flotheme template will come with a parent and a child theme. The Parent theme is the standard theme template that you will use on your site, however some users require additional flexibility and wish to edit the theme templates or create their own.

What is a child theme?

A child theme is a theme that inherits the functionality and styling of another theme, called the parent theme. Child themes are the recommended way of modifying an existing theme.

Why Use a Child Theme?

If you’re going to be modifying your sites code and don’t want it overwritten when making theme updates, then using a child theme is the best option.

Safe Updates – You can easily modify your website using child themes without ever changing the parent theme. When a new version of the parent theme appears, you can safely update it as all your modifications are saved in the child theme.

Flexible and Easy to Extend – A child theme has a great flexibility. It does not require writing a lot of code. You can modify only those template files and functions that you need.

Note! All users are required to use a parent theme, the child theme can be installed and activated after the parent theme is installed.

How to Install a Child theme

A WordPress child theme is a theme that inherits the functionality of another theme, called the parent theme. Child themes allow you to modify, or add to the functionality of that parent theme. A child theme is the safest and easiest way to modify an existing theme, whether you want to make a few tiny changes or extensive changes. Instead of modifying the theme files directly, you can create a child theme and override within.

The majority of our themes are shipped with a basic child theme which can be used.

We recommend using child themes if you want to make changes that require changing theme’s templates. You must be aware that you must have at least some knowledge of php, html and css if you want to create use and modify a child theme.

To install your child theme, go to https://flothemes.com/my-account/my-downloads/ and download the  zip file that contains the child theme. Unzip it and locate the child theme.

The child theme name is the same as the parent theme’s name followed by ‘-child’. As you can see in the example below, for Cozy theme it will be ‘cozy-child.zip’ :

Upload your theme as normal, you can see how to install a theme here.

Once installed you can activate it, and edit the files as required.

For more details info on child themes check out the WordPress documentation below: https://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes