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Firstly I apologise for what no doubt is a probably relative straight forward question for someone with the relevant experience:

Is it possible to change the complete look of a theme however keeps its functions? I've seen a word press theme that I like but its visually 'ugly'. Its a complicated website with a lot of functions however i'm interested in knowing whether the style of it can be completely changed.

In a nutshell.... Can I buy a mercedes benz, take the chassis off and put a Ferrari chassis over the top whilst keeping the brakes , gearbox, etc!?!??!

This is the theme: http://demos.appthemes.com/?theme=jobroller There is a 'child theme' that I like (I may not be upto speed on the terminology)

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    Maybe... but this is much, much too broad of a question to be addressed here and and the answer is very dependent on the theme(s) you are working with.
    – s_ha_dum
    Commented Dec 17, 2013 at 19:22

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Yes, you can do this with Child Themes. A child theme is a WordPress theme that is based on another theme. The child theme points to the parent theme, and inherits styles, functions, and templates from the parent theme. However, in the child theme you can override any style rules and templates that you want with new ones.

Depending on how extensive the changes you want to make are, you might create a child theme that includes just a few style sheet changes, inheriting everything else from the parent. If you want to make more changes, you can include new templates to replace the old ones.

The big advantage you have creating a child theme (rather than simply editing the existing theme) is that in the future when the original theme developer issues an update to the parent theme, you can update the parent theme and you won't lose any changes that you made with your child theme.

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  • Hi Ben, Thanks for the rapid response. I've added a link to the theme in my original post.
    – ric
    Commented Dec 17, 2013 at 19:38
  • Cheers Ben. I appreciate you may or may not be a project manager but is the order of things as follows: 1) Find a web designer to design a theme based on the parent theme. 2) pass the designs over to a coder. 3) coder completes the stitching of the new design with the functions of the parent theme. Is that the general rule?
    – ric
    Commented Dec 17, 2013 at 19:53
  • @ric That sounds about right, but at this point, if you aren't a developer yourself, and you don't know what to do next, I think your next step is to talk about your situation to someone who is. It really depends on how extensive the changes are that you have in mind.
    – Ben Miller
    Commented Dec 17, 2013 at 20:16
  • @BenMiller Are you sure that "grandchild" themes work? All the references I've found indicate that Parent→Child works fine, but Grandchild is a step too far. (There are ways to do it using a child theme and a plugin to load custom CSS, but that's not really a grandchild theme, in that it's not a theme.) Can you provide links showing that WP natively allows granchild themes?
    – Pat J
    Commented Dec 17, 2013 at 21:47
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    @PatJ You are right that grandchild themes are not natively supported by WordPress, and I've removed that from my answer. There are a couple of methods for doing it (creating a grandchild theme plugin or using symbolic links), but these are more complicated than a simple child theme.
    – Ben Miller
    Commented Dec 17, 2013 at 21:57

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