It’s bound to be asked. Can you make a child theme of a child theme of a theme. Boy, is that a mouthful!
What is a WordPress Theme?
A theme is a completely new layout of a WordPress Installation. It uses the WordPress installation as a base and adds all kinds of presentation and format changes. Our DocOut WordPress Theme is such a theme.
What is a WordPress Child Theme?
A WordPress Child Theme would be a spin off of one of the WordPress Themes. A good example of a child theme is our DocOut Twenty Ten Child Theme. It takes all the great capabilities and basic layouts of the Twenty Ten Theme and adds our capabilities, like a better document outline and better search engine optimization to the pages.
How about a child theme of a child theme?
DocOut Black is a child theme of Twenty Ten using all the details in the DocOut Twenty Ten Child Theme. So it is basically a child theme of a child theme. I grandchild so to speak. Here is how I created the DocOut Black Theme.
Copy the DocOut Twenty Ten Child Theme
This will give you a great base to work from.
Change the name of the Directory it is in
In this case, I would change the name of docout_twentyten to docout_black.
Make all my changes in this new directory
I can make all my changes now and then save it as a new child theme of Twenty Ten. Changes would include CSS changes and basic layout information, like font sizes and colors. If I was going to make major changes in the layout, I would create an entirely new theme base.
The DocOut Twenty Ten Child Theme
This is what the DocOut Twenty Ten Child Theme is all about. Take the DocOut Twenty Ten child theme and make your own child theme from that. All I ask is to give credit for everyones hard work. As an example: In the Docout Twenty Ten Child Theme, I have a link to the developer of the theme, and a link to the developer of the child theme. For a child of the child theme, I would have a link to the Twenty Ten Theme, a link to the Docout Child Theme, then a link to the Child of the DocOut Twenty Ten child theme. This is getting confusing! Not really, but this is the beauty of this entire child theme process.
Directory of Child Themes of our Child Theme
This is why we will have a directory of all these child themes and child themes of child theme (should I be calling them grandchild themes?). When you get listed in our DocOut directory you are letting everyone know, you have the proper document outline and have used the docout theme or docout twenty ten child theme. We also created the WordPress Child Theme Directory to list all child themes.