Child Theme Questions (Pro)

Oh and there’s a second thing: Is it possible to change the “Before Main Content” widget area to an “After Main Content” widget area? I’d love to have my search bar right above the pagination.

And a third: We now have a secondary menu down above the footer, and I’d like to erase our blog’s tagline down there. I guess that means child theme work, too?

Sorry for all the requests, but the new Pro possibilities ignited my imagination… ha ha…

+ Thank you Ben, Ignite’s awesome!

Hey thanks for upgrading!

I’ve been meaning to expand upon the child theme tutorial. You’re right – there’s a lot more to cover.

Here’s how editing the PHP files works. If you want to edit a part of the site, you find the relevant PHP file in Ignite Plus, and then copy it into your Ignite Plus child theme. Once you have a copy of one of the template files in your child theme, the version in your child theme will be loaded instead of the version in Ignite Plus.

For instance, to change the “Published:” text, you would want to copy the content.php file from Ignite Plus into your child theme. Then, on lines 16 and 89, you can change the “Published” text.

For moving the widget area, this is possible, but a bit more complicated. You’d want to copy the header.php file into your child theme, and then remove this code from line 63:

<?php get_sidebar( 'before-main' ); ?>

Then the before main content sidebar will no longer be included above the content. Then, you would copy the footer.php file into your child theme. In the footer.php file, you would add the same code above you removed from the header.php file, and put it into the very top of the footer.php file. The widget area would then display below the main content instead of above.

Lastly, for the tagline, you can remove this from line 12 in the footer.php file:

<span><?php bloginfo('description'); ?></span>

Once removed, the tagline will no longer be output in the footer.

Dear Ben,

thank you very much! Worked just fine. Although: The widget area is now under the pagination, not above.

When do I just replace entrys like I did when I replaced ‘Published’ with ‘On’? And when do I use an arrow (=>) and place the new entry next to the original entry?

Like I did here:
<?php comment_form( array( 'title_reply' => 'We can cover that by a line of dialogue...') ); ?>

Best,
Arno

Sure thing, glad the updates are going well ??

I see what you mean about the pagination. Instead of placing the widget area output function in footer.php, place it in index.php instead. Line 64 would be best. That is after the closing </div> tag and before the pagination function below.

As for when to use an arrow, the answer is rather complicated. The previous text was within a string of “internationalized” text, whereas in the comment form example the text is being set as a value in an array used to hold the comment_form() parameters. It’s really a matter of the mechanics of PHP.

I think the best way is to simply change the text without altering any of the surrounding code. If you are editing text in this way, it won’t cause any errors or unwanted effects in the code.