We’ve created a child theme for Parallel Lite and Pro to make customization and theme updates easier.
Download Parallel Lite Child Theme (free version)
Download Parallel Pro Child Theme (paid version)
What is a Child Theme?
A child theme is a theme that inherits its functionality from another WordPress theme, the parent theme. Child themes are often used when you want to customize or tweak an existing WordPress theme without losing the ability to upgrade that theme. In the past, there was no easy way of updating WordPress themes without losing all the custom styling and changes that you had made. This becomes chaos when all the sudden you find out a widely used script in popular themes has a major exploit, and you need to update your themes ASAP. It becomes a tough choice because on one hand, you would lose all the custom styles if you update. On the other hand, you risk your site getting hacked if you don’t update fast enough.
The core team and the community decided to solve this problem by introducing the concept of parent theme and child theme. A child theme in WordPress would inherit all the functionality, features, and the code of the parent theme without making any changes to the parent theme itself. This allowed users to change the styling of the parent theme and add/modify features without losing the ability to update the parent theme.
Advantages of Using a Child Theme
Like most things, there are advantages and disadvantages to using a WordPress Child theme. Let’s take a look at advantages first.
1. Safe Updates
A child theme automatically inherits the parent theme’s features, styles, and templates. This allows you to make changes to your site using child themes without ever modifying the parent theme. When a new version of the parent theme arrives, you can safely update it as all your modifications are saved in the child theme.
2. Easy to Extend
A child theme built on a powerful theme framework allows a great deal of flexibility without writing a lot of code. You can selectively modify only the template files and functions that you need without going through other template files. You can add new functionality and much more.
3. Fallback Safe
When you are creating a complete theme you need to think about all the possible scenarios and code for them. However, when you are working on a child theme and you forget to code for something, then there is always the parent theme’s functionality available as the fallback option.