Merging two themes?

  • Hi. I’m a PHP dev but practically a newbie when it comes to WordPress.

    I have an existing WordPress project that already has it’s own custom theme. Now client wants to upgrade the main theme to something else but wants to retain the look and feel of the old theme.

    My initial approach was to make the old theme a child of the new theme. (Am I doing this right?) And then work from there. So far, I’ve just tinkered with functions.php and the css files and I’ve gotten the home page to somehow look like the original, but not quite. For example, there’s this call to wp_title that has an output that already incorporates a title tag (e.g. <title>Title Text</title>) when the new child theme is active, but works ok on the original and other themes.

    I’d like to request for some tips on which files to look into and what functions and hooks I should be looking out for to speed things up – apart from the obvious styles.css, functions.php, header.php, footer.php, sidebar.php. I suppose you get the drift.

    Many thanks for any help you may extend. Cheers!

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • Wouldn’t it be better to make the new theme a child of the old? Or simply fork the old theme to create a completely new custom themes?

    Thread Starter pajkins

    (@pajkins)

    @esmi: Thanks for the reply. The new theme is a commercial framework and appears to be more complex than the old one. Hence, I opted to make the old one the child. How do I properly fork a theme?
    What I’ve actually done is copy the entire contents of the old theme into a new theme folder and named it something else. Then just edited the stylesheet to include the new theme as template making it a child. Am I on the right path?

    Not quite. What you have effectively done is almost fork the old theme into a new one. To complete this, copy over the stylesheet from the old theme into the new. This should remove any dependency on the old theme long term.

    Thread Starter pajkins

    (@pajkins)

    Got it. Thanks for your help.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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