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WordPress How to Make a Website with WordPress Customizing WordPress Themes How to Make Child Themes

Nathan Bolerjack
Nathan Bolerjack
2,007 Points

Child Theme results in "broken theme"

When I try to make a child theme folder inside my wordpress themes folder - the only result is that my parent theme appears "broken" to wordpress. What am I doing wrong?

Tyler _
Tyler _
6,651 Points

make sure you aren't putting the child theme folder inside the parent folder.

Also, make sure your CSS file in Child reads something like this:

/* Theme Name: TwentyFifteen Child Theme Description: A demo child theme for the default TwentyFifteen theme Author: zgordon Template: twentyfifteen

(optional values you can add: Theme URI, Author URI, Version, License, License URI, Tags, Text Domain) */

1 Answer

Hi Nathan,

Do you receive a more specific error in the Appearance section of your admin? For example, does it say that your stylesheet is missing?

If not, a couple of things to check would be that you have a style.css and a functions.php. The style.css will need to contain a specific section at the top as Tyler mentions.

Here's the info for How to Create a Child Theme from the WordPress Codex. Replace any references to Twenty Fifteen or Twenty Fifteen Child with your parent / child themes and you should be sorted.

Hope that helps :)

-Rich