Create Your Own 500 Child Theme

Building child themes for the Theme 500 crowdfunding framework is very straight forward. Use the following steps to get started, and if you have any questions, use the forums to get in touch. We’ll be happy to help.

Initial Requirements

1. WordPress 5.5+
2. IgnitionDeck Crowdfunding (free, Echelon, or Enterprise)
3. IgnitionDeck’s Minimum Requirements
4. Theme 500 Framework

Getting Started

1. Create a folder in your WordPress themes directory, using any name you like. In this case, we’ll call it ‘fh-child-theme.’
2. Create a style.css file and save it in your new directory.
3. (Optional) Import the Theme 500 stylesheet to include the base css package.
   @import url("../fivehundred/style.css");
@import url("../fivehundred/transitions.css");
4. Create a screenshot.png and place it in your new directory. This will display in the WordPress appearance admin.
5. Add this to the top of your style.css file, above the import statements:
   /* Theme Name: Your Child Theme Name
Theme URI: Your Child Theme URL
Description: Your Child Theme Description
Author: Your Name
Author URI: Your URL
Template: fivehundred
Version: 1.0 */
6. Visit the WordPress theme menu and activate your new theme.

Congratulations, you’ve created a Theme 500 child theme!

Advanced

The Theme 500 Framework uses the WordPress function get_template_part() to retrieve template files. For example, the get_template_part(‘project-featured’) function retrieves the template for the featured area in the Classic child theme.

To remove this portion, simply delete that line, or better yet, replace it with your own function.

To create your own version of the modified section, simply create a file called project-featured.php and save it in your child theme directory. Now, this will automatically overwrite the original template. Alternatively, you can rename the function and create a new file matching said name (e.g. get_template_part(‘my-template’) with a file named my-template.php).

If you wish to add functions to the Theme 500 framework, create your own functions.php and include those functions. These will automatically extend the framework functions.