Razor child theme

• nusolutions

  said

  Just purchased and I’m excited to start using it for a new project. Are there any special instructions for creating a child theme? Should I follow the same steps for creating a child theme in Mingle or Salutation?

  Thanks

• jeffw

  said

  Hi, nusolutions

  Congratulations for posting the first question about Razor.

  To create a child theme for Razor you would follow the same general method as for Mingle and Salutation taking the different number of stylesheets into account.

  In the coming days and weeks we will be adapting the existing tutorials, and also video tutorials are currently in production.

• nusolutions

  said

  Kewl! I’ll give it a go!

  Thanks

• andy

  said

  @nusolutions

  Welcome to the forums and thank you for being one of the first to use Razor. Let us know how things go and post a link to your site when you get it up.

  FYI – I’m working on an improved demo/default content setup that should load placeholder images and just make the initial load look a bit easier to understand and navigate. It’s going to take me a few days to do that but it’s on my list so anything you see or think of that could be improved please drop me a line here and I’ll make sure it gets taken care of.

• nusolutions

  said

  Will do! Thanks for another great theme.

• nusolutions

  said

  Looks like I missed a step in the child theme setup as I don’t have layouts or any features of the parent theme. If I activate the parent theme I see the different layout options and settings but not while using the child theme. I followed the Mingle steps and did copy over the assets folder so what else am I missing?

  tia

• jeffw

  said

  Hi, nusolutions.

  There are additional steps required when making a child theme for the Razor theme.

  With the Razor theme activated, go to Appearance > Layouts, scroll down to the foot of the page and click on the Export Settings button. A new page will appear with a box on it that contains an encoded string of characters that is your current Layout settings. Copy this text to your clipboard, load up a text editor – such as Notepad (Win) or TextEdit (Mac) – and paste the contents of your clipboard into a new text document. Then save the text document giving it a filename such as parallelus-razor-layouts.txt for example.

  Now do the same thing for Appearance > Sidebars and Appearance > Slide Shows, naming the text files appropriately.

  You should end up with three text files.

  So now load the first of those three files – parallelus-razor-layouts.txt – into your text editor, select all the text and copy it to your clipboard. In your WordPress admin dashboard activate your child theme, go to Appearance > Layouts, scroll to the foot of the page and click the Import Settings button. Click in the big input box and paste the contents of your clipboard into the box. Then click on the Import Data button.

  Do the same thing for Appearance > Sidebars and Appearance > Slide Shows, making sure that you paste the correct settings for each of them.

  That should be it, now you should have a complete child theme for Razor.

  Note that these settings are stored separately in your site’s database for the child theme; this enables the child theme to have different layouts, sidebars and slideshows to the parent theme.

• keyhanjun

  said

  Hi,

  could you please embed the child theme in the next update so that we only need to activate it & it works out of the box?

  Would be awesome!

  Thanks!

• andy

  said

  @keyhanjun

  I’m not a fan of doing what you’re suggesting with child themes because I think it causes more confusion for beginners than it’s worth. The process of creating a child theme takes less than 5 minutes and for advanced users I think it’s easier to have an understanding of what make the child theme work than add the extra confusion for beginners.

• keyhanjun

  said

  No problem, I get your point.

• andy

  said

  @keyhanjun

  Thanks, I appreciate the understanding.

  I wish I could do every request like this, but with WordPress there is an incredible range of skill levels you don’t see typically with other programs. The sheer number of “first timers” and people that have never created a website before makes it challenging to do certain things because there can be no assumption of knowledge at all. I imagine this is what Microsoft felt like when creating early version of MS Word and similar programs where the users was a soccer mom and didn’t even have a basic knowledge of word processing terminology. “What should an icon look like for creating a page break for someone that doesn’t know what that is?”, I imagine were common conversations they had around the development table. These are the types of questions that determine the direction of my daily life.

• jeffw

  said

  @keyhanjun

  I have made it a priority to get a tutorial done for this, and also for creating a custom stylesheet. I will be working on this later today, I hope to have both finished by tomorrow, Tuesday latest.

• keyhanjun

  said

  Thank you very much for your efforts!

• nusolutions

  said

  Thanks!

• jeffw

  said

  The child theme tutorial is now published: http://para.llel.us/support/tutorials/making-a-child-theme-for-razor/