Should I tweak the ready to use theme or build my own theme for our website

  • I’m quite new to wordpress..
    There are a couple of questions I’d like to ask.
    I have these basic requirements for our organization’s website. The requirements are:
    – Display news.
    – Store documents (most are in pdf), images (image gallery), and videos (video gallery).
    I learn that wordpress based website is tightly coupled with theme it uses. It will determine what kind of features we can have (like image galleries) on our website.
    So I try to look at the theme documentation. From what I read, it takes quite a lot of effort to build our own theme.
    My situation is that I don’t have enough time to build our own theme.
    Is it possible for me to use existing themes and tweak it here and there so it will fulfill our requirements, especially the look of the website ?
    Thanks

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

  • Yes, using child themes you can alter any of the parent themes function or style.

    To clarify @batharoy’s comment, child themes are easy to set up and allow you to piggyback off a fully developed theme.

    There are 2 main points you should know when making one:

    1) The css will not be imported into the child theme, so you’re going to want to import the parent theme’s css like this:
    @import url("../twentyfourteen/style.css");

    This is assuming that you are making a child theme for the Twenty Fourteen theme.

    2) The functions.php file of the child “does not override its counterpart from the parent. Instead, it is loaded in addition to the parent’s functions.php”.

    In general child themes are a great way to get the best of both using a fully developed theme, and customizing your theme as you need without worrying about upgrades overriding your changes.

    The functions.php file of the child “does not override its counterpart from the parent.

    That is not strictly true. Many functions in parent themes are preceded by if ( ! function_exists( 'function_name' ) ) : which means that the parent’s function will not be loaded if there is a function of the same name in the child.

    Thread Starter nashrul123

    (@nashrul123)

    Thanks for the reply folks,
    I think creating a child theme is the most non intrusive way of customizing a theme compared to change the php code.

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