wordpress method for loading headers and footers

Have brought this topic accross from another topic to reply:

@kkrop

Hey Pete-

Thank you very much for your post–I’m a first-time WP designer who’s been struggling with exactly this issue while working with an iThemes Flexx child theme. Just looks like the plug in is going out to the parent theme for header and footer stuff rather than finding the edited files in the child theme. I’d like to try your suggestion above but noticed your reference to using get_header() and get_footer() and realized I was out of my depth.

Is the code highlighted above sufficient to solve this problem on its own, or are there other changes I’d need to make elsewhere (like the get_header() and get_footer() references) for this fix to work?

Apologies in advance for the layman’s questions…

Thanks!
Karl

@kkropp

Do I understand correctly that the theme’s using something like require ('/wp-contnet/..../header.php')?

In that case, yes replacing that with get_header() will load attempt to load header.php from the child theme if it exists, otherwise it will load it from the parent theme.

Similar applies for get_footer().

Pete