Child Theme after X parent

Support
#1

Hi I am a beginner and did not know about the Child Theme until recently. Now I need to translate my webpage to other languages and I think I need to have a Child Theme in order to do so. However, my page is now live and I have not made any CSS or Java Script changes myself; perhaps the only visible changes have to do with the plugins I am using.

I will do a back up but after changing my X Theme to Child Theme, should I be worry about losing other information? I have a webhost provider, do they have to do this for me or can I do it by myself? Or is it as easy as to change the theme in Appearances-> Themes ?

Thank you in advance

#2

Hello @pawinna,

Thanks for asking and hope you are having a good day. :slight_smile:

The concept of child theme is pretty simple, child theme will inherit the features and functions of parent theme. In general you won’t face any hiccups upon installing child theme. Setting up child theme is easy. I suggest you to refer our knowledgebase tutorial to install and setup child theme:

We also have published article to help you get started with translation. Sharing the link to help you get started:

Let us know how it goes.

Thanks.

#3

Thank you for the information. I downloaded and have it in my Themes. Is it as easy as to Activate it to change to a Child Theme? will I have any information lost? will i keep on being able to use Cornerstone or will everything become HTML? And the plug ins, will they move with or will they be lost as with its information or whatever settings I put in them?

And about the translation, does it mean i have to upload x.pot file in my FTP panel? And I see that this translation seems to be more for translating the Theme in wordpress rather than translating the content of the webpage itself. Am I incorrect? Do I have to use WPML then?

#4

Hi There,

You only need to use a child theme if you want to manually add any customizations to the X theme template files. So that your customizations will remain separately while you can update the X parent theme.

Cornerstone editor and other customizer settings will work as usual.

With regard to your translation issue, if you need to maintain multi language content site, you can use a plugin like WPML.

Hope that’s clear.
Thanks!

#5

So just to be clear, any customizations such as CSS that has been done in the Theme Options and Cornerstone will be okay?
If I understand correctly child themes is useful if there changes being made to things like PHP files?

Thanks!

#6

Hello Ari,

Thanks for updating this thread.

Please be advised that Custom CSS or Cornerstone’s Custom CSS goes with the Theme Option Settings or the Cornerstone’s page/post contents. With or without a child theme, all of them will be saved in the database. When there is a theme updates, all of those will always be safe.

The child theme is necessary when you want to modify the template files or override custom PHP functions. When there is a parent theme updates, the files and custom functions will not change because it is in the child theme.

Hoe this helps.

#7

Thank you very much for the clarification!

#8

You’re most welcome, Ari.