It is time for Twenty Eleven Child Theme

Twenty Eleven child theme is now should be made when you want to modify Twenty Eleven, the default theme or WP 3.2 which is already available for everyone who use wordpress, and find wordpress updates is necessary to do.

I have upgrade this blog successfully without any issues, but like usual, there are a lot of users who have problems after wordpress upgrades which may be caused by alot of things, can be plugins or even themes.

I hope your blog stays cool and runs as usual if you have upgrade yours. If not, if you have just installed wordpress 3.2 in your webserver, then I hope you will have fun with Wp 3.2 +

I remember about a year ago, I wanted to create a video tutorial about Twenty Ten child theme.

However, I already found so many tutorials about it, and I thought the newest wp version will be released very soon, and soon, that tutorial would be less needed, so I guess it is a good time to create this Twenty Eleven child theme.

This tutorial is very simple actually, which works on mostly on the css style. (related: how to edit css file in wordpress). Apart of on the CSS file, I would use this Twenty Ten child theme to modify header a bit.

Twenty Eleven Child Theme – Why do we need it?

Just like Twenty Ten theme, the previous default theme or template, when we make modifications or customizations on the structure or layout, we would be happy what we can do.

But the problem would be when wordpress is updating some of its theme files, those custom layout modification would be just overrided with the newest files, and our customization would be just useless.

Therefore, it is best to use Twenty Eleven child theme to customize TwentyEleven theme safely, and we can modify anything we want, without being afraid that in the next update, our own style will be gone.

There are many customization you can make, depends on the coding language you have. People like me, who has very very limited PHP coding language, will only modify some of the CSS style, and so forth.

This Twenty Eleven child theme tutorial is included, I only can show you small examples modifying some CSS style, but not PHP file.

Twenty Eleven Child Theme simple video tutorial

The purpose of creating this tutorial is because I guess it will be the simplest tutorial for newbie.

I have read Twenty Ten child theme tutorial from Aaron Jorbin, it is really great tutorial, but I have realized most of the codes are not for me. I am confused to see those codes!

If you are really newbie and want uncomplicated way to create a Twenty Eleven child theme, this post might help.

Video tutorial

Steps:

1. Basically, creating a child theme will best begin with creating a blank style.css file, and import the “original” theme’s style.css file.

So to begin, we will have to create a new folder in wp-content/themes/ folder.

In this demo, I name that folder “MyTwentyEleven”. So it will look like, wp-content/themes/MyTwentyEleven

2. Inside this new made folder, we will create a new file, and name it, “style.css”.

3. In this blank style.css file, we can add these lines:

/*
Theme Name: MyTwentyEleven
Theme URI: Your URL
Description: My own Twenty Eleven copy
Author: Your name
Template: twentyeleven
*/

4. And then, hit enter once, and add this line of code:
@import url('../twentyeleven/style.css');

Screenshot:

The new style.css of the child theme

5. Save file, and you can start to modify the style, color, etc.

Creating Twenty Eleven child theme is an important step when we want to modify this default theme.