Wordpress - Theme Customization

Question

I understand that to customize a theme I need to create a child theme. I wanted to know if the changes made on the "Edit themes" screen are also overwritten when the theme is updated. That being the case, what use is it?

Answer 1

Hello @Anquim, In this case I believe we can see the customization part in four ways.

1. You can create your custom theme by converting an html and css layout to a theme, this is usually done by creating a folder in the wp-Contents/themes folder where your theme will reside, including a style.css that contains the metadata and styles of your theme and an index.php that represents the layout, you can create other files to represent pages of categories, posts, comments, etc.

2. You can Edit the properties of a theme that already exists. Some themes have options so you can customize it, such as choosing colors of backgrounds, number of columns, logo, among other settings, you can even do this with your own themes as well.

3. Children themes. This is a good option to customize a theme without "breaking" the update flow, in this case you create a child theme, and in this child theme you apply only the changes you would like the parent theme to have. This way the parent theme can continue to be updated independently, and depending on the degree of change you have made it may not be necessary to change your child theme.

4. Edit the theme files we are using, this option is less recommended exactly by the remark you made, edit a theme that is not yours can cause you can not update the theme without losing your changes.

We then arrived at the reason of the editing screen.

Yes if you edit files of a theme using this screen the changes are saved in the files of your server, in this case when an update of these files occurs, for example, if you update the theme, the changes will be overwritten.

When creating a child theme there is an update flow and this screen allows, if you want a quick interface of editing the files.

It is important to note that you are not required to use this screen, it works more like a convenience, and that once you modify files by this screen they will be different from versions of the repositories or their local version.

It is a question of what you need, if you remember whenever you are editing the theme on your local computer to download the version of the server before performing modifications should not have any problems, that being said, I personally use it for minor adjustments when necessary in my own subjects.