It’s Easy to Make Child Themes with Twenty Ten: Download My First WordPress Theme

One of the parts of Using WordPress that I’ve been spending a lot of time learning the whole WordPress theming area. Theme frameworks, Parent-child themes, CSS, PHP, Menus, Custom Post Types and Custom Taxonomies all interesting parts of WordPress 3.0 that I’ve been delving into and making some headway with. Last night, while working on said chapter on themes, I decided to switch to the new default theme for WordPress 3.0 Twenty Ten—Trying Twenty Ten for a Time—then I got the idea that maybe I should try my hand at making a child theme for Twenty Ten. That’s the goal with Twenty Ten, really, that child themes will be built from it—New Theme: Twenty Ten—not to hack at it like was often done with Kubrick.

First off I used this Parent-Child theming guide by Ian Stewart—WordPress Child Theme Basics—then I decided that all I wanted to do (for now) was to use the new Google Webfonts—Google Font Directory—instead of the “normal” fonts.

It didn’t make more than a couple minutes to create the one, and only, file needed for the child theme: style.css. Then I just added the code to import all the two Google fonts I wanted (Cantarell and Droid Sans Mono) and put in the code to change the fonts. One quick screenshot and Twenty Ten dot Five was born! If you’d like use this theme, first you need to have Twenty Ten installed as an available theme and running the latest beta of WordPress 3.0—WordPress 3.0, Beta 2—then you can download this wee zip file and install Twenty Ten dot Five (the dot Five is because it’s May) like a regular theme and activate it—Twenty Ten dot Five.

No, this theme isn’t fancy or doing any more than changing the fonts. I didn’t intend it to be. This is an example of how easy it is to make a child theme.

If you want to learn more about WordPress 3.0 before my book comes out you can join Catherine Winters and I at WordCamp Vancouver where we’ll be talking about WordPress 3.0 (and themes).