If you are building a serious WordPress site, it’s likely you have bought a good theme, either because it looks good, or is easy to use or both. I’m a fan of Enfold, I like the visual page builder than the others I’ve seen, and I know that handing it off to clients who don’t spend their days on Stack Overflow evaluating code snippets.

Your theme, if it’s good, will be getting updated from time to time, and you want to protect whatever customization you make to the theme. Therefore, a child theme is essential. Luckily, it’s so friggin easy.

Part One, super easy:

Steps (I do this in my sleep now for new projects):

• get set up with FTP access to your site
• make sure your parent theme is there, and note the name of the folder it is in. The folder name is important here not the name in the heading of the stylesheet.
• in the wp-content > themes folder, create a new folder for your child theme. I usually name it for the client and the year, so we can track how old it gets, so something like “clientname2016”
• In that folder create two files: “styles.css” and “functions.php”

Put a header in the style.css file that looks like this. It needs a minimum of 2 things: the child theme name, and the template (parent) theme name, but if can have more lines in it (see below).

 /*
Theme Name: Client Name 2016
Template: twentyfifteen
*/ 
Put this in the functions.php file:
<?php
add_action( 'wp_enqueue_scripts', 'theme_enqueue_styles' );
function theme_enqueue_styles() {
    wp_enqueue_style( 'parent-style', get_template_directory_uri() . '/style.css' );

} 
Now you can go back to your WP Admin dashboard and activate the child theme you made. You can, of course, but in a .png as a preview for your themes page, and of course take off and running with your customizations.
Part Two, get off and running…
The child theme allows you to make modifications to your theme without being affected when you update the parent theme. Adding CSS to that styles.css file will override parent theme styles, and functions added to that functions theme will be added to the parent functions used in the site.
Furthermore, files you add to the child theme folder will replace the ones in the parent. For example, if you want to customize the header.php you can copy the one in the parent, and paste it in the child theme in the same relative position. Feel free to edit the file, changing php and html code as you wish. More complicated themes often have various template parts or files in subfolders, and once you identify one you need to modify, set up the same structure in your child. Say, in a folder called “includes” there is one called “helper-main-menu.php”. Simply create a folder in your child theme called includes, and paste that file in it, then hack away!

			

I seem to always have to remind myself of this one… whether it is someone else’s theme I’m dealing with, or an Underscores starter, or for whatever reason the body classes seem insufficient, I always like having the page name in the body classes. This makes it easy to target something that may need to happen on a particular page, and safeguards against the client deleting and re-establishing that page. In any event, if you need the same this is a simple fix. The body_class() function can be filtered and elements added to the array there. You can of course use the page slug or any other detail from the $post object.

//Page Slug Body Class
function add_body_class( $classes ) {
global $post;
if ( isset( $post ) ) {
$classes[] = $post->post_name;
}
return $classes;
}
add_filter('body_class','add_body_class');

Often in the footer of your site you want to write something like: “© 2015 Mick Follari”. But you also don’t want to have to remember to go change it every year, or to teach your clients how to do it. Another thing I found this useful for is in one case I had a client I needed to have an image header with the year built in to it, like “2015 Adventure Film Festival”. I pre-made 5 years of headers and gave them names with the year in them and used the PHP year in the img src filename so they would automatically update on Jan 1.

Many people just want this snippet:

&copy; <?php echo date("Y"); ?>
&copy; <?php echo date("Y").' -YourNameHere'; ?>
&copy; 2012-<?php echo date("Y").' -YourNameHere'; ?>

The first displays just the year, the second adds your name or company, the third shows a range (like “© 2012-2015 Mick Follari”).

There is a long list of arguments you can use to configure the date if you’d rather more than just the year. Here’s the index.

This is a pretty basic thing, but I find people are always asking or looking up how to do. Since most of my sites are in WordPress, I’ll mention first that you should create a Child Theme, then alter the footer.php from your Parent theme in there. If you need to learn more about Child themes there’s plenty out there (and I’ll make a new blog post about it), but start here.

Once you have your Child Theme, copy the footer.php from your Parent theme into the new folder, and start editing the place where it shows the copyright. If the Parent theme is using a filter or hook to write in the copyright, then you only need to unhook that function, and write your own to replace it. That’s another post…