Diesel Coffee Child Theme is a ‘child theme’ created in order to preserve any changes you make to your main theme.
WTF is a child theme? (Trigger warning – geeky bit!)
On the most basic level, a child theme must consist of three things:
- A child theme directory (or folder). Like all themes, your child theme folder will exist inside your WordPress Themes folder that holds your child theme files.
- A style.css file (which will be used to store your child theme CSS)
- A functions.php file – At the basic level this file will hold the wp_enqueue_scripts action that will enqueue the parent theme stylesheet
In most cases, the edits you make are saved in a customiser settings file, but all too often (yes, we’ve done it!) you end up making changes to the main theme files without thinking about it. The main theme dev then releases a new update and boom, you’ve lost all your edits. I’ve lost many a day replacing designs this way. It’s no fun!
Don’t avoid updating your main theme!
Some people edit the main theme files and avoid the inevitable updates by skipping the main updates. This mean you end up with out of date files. This can be dangerous as there are usually security updates packaged in the main theme. If you miss these updates, you can leave your site open to hackers and bots.
Most hacked sites gain access through out of date theme files. It’s generally considered bad practice to avoid updates.
If you are concerned about performing updates, you may want to consider a staging area where you can update the themes and test that everything works before updating your live site.
Diesel Coffee Child Theme – here’s how to create yours
Here’s the tool we use to create a child theme: https://elegantmarketplace.com/child-theme-maker/
Why You Need a Diesel Coffee Child Theme or Divi Child Theme
One important reason to create a child theme is to preserve the modifications you make when updating the parent theme. Whenever you update Divi, all of the theme files are updated so if you have made any changes to these files, those changes will be erased
