Ford Salvage Cars
}
You just created your first child theme, congratulations!
Now it’s time for the fun stuff, start messing up the way it looks!
If you haven’t already, go ahead and upload your child theme to the wp-content/themes folder using FTP. Alternatively, you can .zip the file and upload it via the WordPress theme uploader (Appearance => Themes => Install Themes => Upload)
Chrome Dev Tools
To customize a theme, we need a fast and easy way to see how the theme is put together. We also need a way to test CSS changes without constantly saving and re-saving. Enter Google Chrome Dev Tools.
Google Chrome has some of the best browser tools available for customizing CSS. With these tools we can make CSS changes in the browser window and see their effect in real time.
Want to see how your site would look with all red text? Use Chrome to preview what it would look like without changing the site for your visitors.
If you don’t have Chrome, you can
Sidenote: Some of you are thinking, why not Firebug? I’ve been using Firebug for years and I recently switched to Chrome, and I love it. Firefox has been going downhill recently, it’s super slow and I just couldn’t use it anymore. Chrome on the other hand, is fast and user friendly. Use Firebug if you want, see if I care!
How do I use the Dev Tools?
It’s easier to show you than tell you how to do it, so here’s a video for your viewing pleasure.
Check out this post for links to PDFs and more good stuff about Chrome Dev Tools:
Important: These changes are for preview purposes only, they don’t affect the actual css files! You still have to go in and manually change the css files and save them.
Uploading your changes
After you figure out which changes you want to make, you need to add them to your child theme stylesheet and upload the new stylesheet to your site. There are a few different ways to do that.
WordPress Appearance Editor
It’s possible to use the editor built into WordPress to make your changes. This is a fast and easy way to make a few changes, but it’s not a good long term solution.
To edit your child theme stylesheet inside WordPress, first make sure your child theme is active. Next login to your admin area and go to Appearance => Editor. You should see your child theme stylesheet in the editor, if you don’t, click “Stylesheet” in the right hand column.
You can make your edits here and save them.
Text Editor/FTP
The most common way to edit website files is to use a text editor to edit the files and upload them to the child theme folder via FTP. I use , which is an all-in-one solution for MAC, but there are lots of other programs to do this.
Text editors:
For Windows, is one solution. For MAC, try .
FTP programs:
is free and easy to use (Firefox browser add-on) is compatible with Windows
When we make changes to any theme files, you will need to make the changes in your text editor, then FTP them up to your server to overwrite the old file. (Or make the changes in the appearance editor and save)
Project Based Example
Now let’s put this together and make a change using the child theme style.css file. Let’s change the color of the header and footer background in Designfolio.
You always need to make sure you are using the most recent theme files, so first open your FTP program, navigate to wp-content/themes, and download the child theme to your computer.
Open the child theme style.css file in your text editor. (Or skip the FTP and text editor and just go to your WordPress admin area, Appearance => Editor, and click on style.css on the right side).
Open your site in Google Chrome, and open the Dev Tools (right-click and select “inspect element”). Click on the magnifying glass at the very bottom left of the Dev Tools, and hover over the header. Move your cursor around until it looks like the entire colored area is selected, then click.
You should have selected #header-container. Now look in the right sidebar of the Dev Tools, and you should see something like this:
123 | #header-container, .footer-widget-container {
|
