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IDProjectCategoryView StatusLast Update
0003300Composrthemewizardpublic2017-06-02 19:32
ReporterPaul FlavelAssigned ToChris Graham 
SeverityFeature-request 
Status closedResolutionwon't fix 
Product Version 
Fixed in Version 
Summary0003300: Child Themes
DescriptionAs a request, it would be nice to be able to create child themes.

A child theme will only be able to have custom css files. templates will remain as part of the parent.

Any template changes, or CSS changes in the parent will show across all children, except the css changes made in the child. This will allow easier changes across a multisite.

Can elaborate further on this.
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Time estimation (hours)
Sponsorship open

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Chris Graham

2017-06-02 19:32

administrator   ~0005109

I don't want to do this because I think on balance it would hurt performance and confuse users.

Performance because:
a) to do auto-decaching checks it would need to check right back across each theme in the hierarchy
b) it would need to read in theme meta-information to workout hierarchical relationships for each page view

Confuse users:
I see people casually setting theme relationships, but then failing to be able to manage it properly. Frankly we've seen too many cases before where we've added a new level of flexibility, which excites people, and they over-use it. "Too much rope to hang yourself with". For example, a webmaster loves the idea of having 10 websites, so creates 11 themes with inheritance, then forgets about various overrides they have in lower-level themes and can't work out why changes won't show. Or is successful, but is not able to fit everything into their head when a theme-compat breaking upgrade comes along. I know it sounds silly, but this kind of thing happens all the time. Contrast to Wordpress, where people are able to make high quality sites by limiting their ambitions for scope and focusing on design and content (the right way to do it). Obviously we don't want to be Wordpress, but I don't want us to go further down the complexity path.

All themes will inherit from the default theme, so I suggest just editing the default theme and working with that.

Issue History

Date Modified Username Field Change
2017-05-29 11:29 Paul Flavel New Issue
2017-06-02 19:32 Chris Graham Note Added: 0005109
2017-06-02 19:32 Chris Graham Status non-assigned => closed
2017-06-02 19:32 Chris Graham Assigned To => Chris Graham
2017-06-02 19:32 Chris Graham Resolution open => won't fix