Customizing TwentyTen footer with child theme

I believe that all you need to do is copy twentyten’s footer.php to your child theme and alter it.

I had considered that option but it doesn’t seem to be in keeping with the approach of using hooks and overrides. I.e. it makes for a maintenance burden any time TwentyTen is updated.

But looking at footer.php it just seems to be all hard coded. I guess because the footer widgets are supposed to do the job. Hmmm. I have a thought. I wonder if I can spread my license statement across the footer widgets. ??

That is exactly how child themes are supposed to work. If you want to alter a file in the parent you do so by putting a file of the same name in the child. The system will automatically replace the parent file with your child file. That is the override mechanism.

Your child file won’t be altered when twentyten is updated so I’m confused as how this creates a maintenance burden.

It creates a maintenance burden because any time TwentyTen is updated I need to consider whether anything has changed in its footer.php

I am changing just a single line of the file. If any of the other lines change I will need to retrofit my change to the new version.

Yes, this is one way child themes can work but there are plenty of examples showing the use of functions.php to override very specific behaviours of the theme, rather than the somewhat crude approach of copy-and-modify – which I could do by copying the entire theme and not bothering with the child approach.

It creates a maintenance burden because any time TwentyTen is updated I need to consider whether anything has changed in its footer.php

That is a problem inherent in the decision to use a child theme, isn’t it? An update of the parent can break anything you do, even if you use action and filter hooks exclusively (if you even had the option in this case). There is no guarantee that the markup around the hook will be unchanged from update to update, and the fact that there is an update pretty much guarantees that something changed. Even a seemingly innocuous change to the stylesheet, assuming its imported, of the parent could blow out, say, a sidebar widget’s layout. I think the point of child themes is more that you won’t loose your changes with updates than it is a guarantee that you won’t have to re-tweak things once in awhile.