By popular request there follows the definitive guide to setting up a child theme to use with the Salutation theme.

1. Give the child theme a name

Inside the wp-content/themes/ folder create a new folder named talyn.

2. Give the child some style

Create a file inside the talyn folder named style.css with the following content:

/*  
Theme Name: Talyn
Description: Child of the Salutation theme
Author: John Crichton
Template: parallelus-salutation
Tags: buddypress
*/
@import url("../parallelus-salutation/style.css");

Then create four more css files:

style-default.css
style-skin-1.css
style-skin-2.css
style-skin-3.css

The content of the style-default.css is just the one line, as follows:

@import url("../parallelus-salutation/style-default.css");

The content of the style-skin-1.css file is four lines, as follows:

/*
	Skin Name: Skin 1
*/
@import url("../parallelus-salutation/style-skin-1.css");

The content of the other three skin files is similar to the style-skin-1.css file above, except that you change according to the skin number the Skin Name on line 2 and the file name of the imported file on line 4.

3. Give the child some assets

Copy the entire assets folder from the parallelus-salutation folder into the talyn folder.

4. A child is born

Go to Appearance > Themes and activate the Talyn theme.

Go to Appearance > Menus > Theme Locations and make sure the Main Menu option is set to the correct menu.

From now on you can make any style additions or alterations to the relevant skin css file in Talyn, but remember that the @import must be the first css in the file, there must be nothing before the @import except comments.

Other things you can do with a child theme include making your own functions.php file that could contain (for example) additional shortcodes, custom post types or custom taxonomies.

If you wanted to mess with a Salutation template, let’s say the template-page.php file that determines how pages are displayed, then you would copy template-page.php from parallelus-salutation into talyn and then you would make whatever changes you wanted to the talyn/template-page.php file, leaving the original Salutation template untouched.  

Resources

• WordPress child theme documentation: http://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes