***Note: This guide is for advanced users***

When creating a classifieds website sometimes you want to apply a couple of changes to the design that you have, but if you do that you would want to use the same Open Classifieds license that you have for your premium theme, which is why we added child themes to our classifieds script.

Child themes enable you to create a theme that takes all the files from your premium theme except for the files that you modified, so lets say for example you modified your homepage and changed the background color at your child theme, then the child theme will take all other files from the parent theme, and this way whenever there is a new update your child theme will take all updated files from the parent theme when it’s updated except for the files that you modified·

This guide is the third of its kind after the first guide on understanding Open Classifieds themes and second guide on how to modify or create open classifieds themes, I recommend you read those two guides as well when you want to modify your site with our classifieds script

Why use child themes in a classifieds script

There are a couple of reasons why you should use child themes when applying modifications:

1. When you modify an existent theme and a new release with an update to that theme comes out, it’s very complex to update that theme. But a child theme would be updated automatically when the parent is updated.
2. It is the best way to start learning how to customize open classifieds themes.
3. Child themes use the same license as their parent theme
4. It will save you development time

How to use child themes:

• Go to your FTP or file manager, navigate to /themes/
• Create a new folder there with a name you choose for your child theme
• Navigate to the parent theme that you want to do modifications on
• Copy the init.php file and paste it in your child theme folder
• Paste the below code in the top of your init.php file
• Login to your OC admin panel
• Activate your child theme

Here is an example of what you would see in your child theme init.php file:

/**
* Theme Name: ChildTheme
* Description: Our latest great theme with 14 different styles/color schemes included and multiple options of configuration. 
* Tags: HTML5, Responsive, Mobile, Premium, Admin Themes, Advanced Configuration, prettyPhoto, Slider.
* Version: 1.6 
* Author: Chema [email protected]
* License: Commercial 
* Parent Theme: kamaleon
*/

Theme::$parent_theme = 'kamaleon';

Note that child themes only work with premium themes because they use the same license as the premium theme, if you don’t have a premium theme yet get it now with a small fee of 3.49$ a month