[wp-hackers] child themes of child themes (grandchildren)

[Mika A Epstein]

Nick, I agree. The slippery slope of definitions is fun.

Genesis is a framework, but you don't treat it like a 'normal' framework 
like _s and Bootstrap. You don't take Genesis, fork it, and publish your 
own version. You always treat it as a parent, which is why I call it a 
managed theme. It's managed from the back end vs forked.

Nicholas Ciske wrote:
>
> On Friday, November 9, 2012, Mika A Epstein wrote:
>
>>
>> A Managed Theme: Genesis, Thesis (I'm missing some, I have a longer list
>> on my other computer)
>>
>> These themes are not intended for children themes! Everything that you
>> should be doing is within the WP Dashboard. All CSS tweaks, and even
>> functions, can be added there-in. Sometimes these are just parent themes
>> that you don't make children off of, ever, and others are children
>> themselves of a framework. The best ones have a way to export your theme
>> settings. To make things easier, you'll find a lot of plugins that do 
>> what
>> most people want, and they never need to edit code.
>>
>> tl;dr: Don't touch the theme code files.
>
>
>
> Genesis is generally called a framework (I'd argue "managed theme" 
> doesn't really apply once you've looked under the hood - perhaps 
> parent theme framework?) for building *custom* child themes - this how 
> I and other developers primarily use it. You don't touch the Genesis 
> code as everything is editable via options, hooks, filters, or 
> template overrides (at least I've yet to find something).
>
> StudioPress also sells pre-built child themes based on Genesis. This 
> is how many people use Genesis child themes. I occasionally use a 
> child theme as the basis for a site. Prose (one StudioPress child 
> theme more akin to Thesis than Genesis itself) has lots of knobs and 
> dials, but most require CSS changes and/or PHP code edits/additions to 
> do changes beyond what the theme author intended.
>
> The recommended way (from StudioPress, as mentioned previously) to 
> make edits to a pre-built child theme is to just modify the child 
> theme directly. When they do update child themes, they are usually a 
> major revision (completely new code but same name), not a minor 
> revision, so updating is more complex than just copying the child 
> theme files over the old ones (so a grandchild theme wouldn't really 
> help here unless edits were minor and then reapplying them is minimal).
>
> If editing a child theme makes you lose sleep at night, you can go the 
> plugin route -- which is possible with Genesis as everything is a hook 
> or filter, so you can totally rewire a child theme from a plugin. 
> Whether this allows you to upgrade in the future depends on what is 
> changed, but it should be more future proof than direct edits.
> e.g. 
> http://www.wp-code.com/wordpress-snippets/wordpress-grandchildren-themes/
>
> Nick Ciske
> http://thoughtrefinery.com/
> @nciske
>
>
>
>
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