This website uses a theme called Storefront. It’s a minimalistic yet elegant theme from Automattic (the creators of WordPress). I literally browsed hundreds of modern and ‘top’ themes at various sources before falling for this one. It was a good fit in its vanilla form and required only little customizations to suit my needs.
Yesterday I logged into my WP admin after a few days and saw several updates piled up. Storefront was one of them. I didn’t upgrade right away for I knew my customizations would be go away with its previous version. I had committed the cardinal sin of modifying the theme directly.
When I found out about the concept of child themes, I said to myself, “shit, I should have guessed already.” A child theme is one that contains files and assets you want changed in a ‘parent’ theme. So, rather than directly editing style.css or functions.php in a parent theme, one can create a child theme and add their modifications there. That’s what I did then. I created a child theme called Storefront AB, derived from the beautiful Storefront theme.
That was fun. It’s live now!
WordPress is a beautiful, sophisticated software, built to scale to millions of websites globally. A lack of something like the concept of child theme didn’t just feel right. I should have trusted my instincts earlier.