Renaming the Twenty Fourteen Wordpress theme

Question

I know the benefits of creating child themes, but it in my case I really would like to create a theme based upon another one without any dependencies to a parent theme. I tried to use a sed command to replace all occurrances of 'Twenty Fourteen'/'Twenty_Fourteen'/ 'twentyfourteen' in all files, but that just doesn't seem to be enough, the theme gets broken.

Is there a way to do this?

Thank you.

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Update - SOLUTION: Rename all instances of 'Twenty Fourteen', 'Twenty_Fourteen' and 'twentyfourteen' to your desired new theme name, watch out for case-sensitivity, it should work out. Use a code editor that can replace words in a directory, sed should also work if you know how to use it properly, unlike me.

Answer 1

I think that the default themes are there to be used. These themes are coded to the standards that should be used and excellent example for new theme authors to learn from. They are also all under the GNU General Public License. I would really think that these are excellent basis to work from when developing a new theme. Why reinvent the wheel when it is already there

I have recently done the same exact thing. It is quite tricky, as it not just simply a mass search en replace operation. You have to methodically check and replace instances. The easiest way to start here is with the localized strings. Simply use a program like Notepad++ and replace 'twnentyfourteen' with 'my-theme'

The safest to go next is to take a string and replace twentyfourteen, like @since Twenty Fourteen 1.0 replace with @since My Theme 1.0.

You need to constantly check that you don't break anything. and if I can give you advice here, do one by one file, Notepad++ have a mass find and replace function. Don't use that. Take one file at a time and replace all instance of twentyfourteen, check and recheck and move to the next template. Grueling task, but worthwhile

Answer 2

Just to add to the answer above, I agree 100% that those are a good basis, I try to use the yearly new theme every time, since all the new features will be implemented in it, and I can just pick what I leave out or not. Anyway, I've done this many many times and I believe it's not as painstaking as a task as Pieter suggests. You can get this done in 15min tops. What i usually do is search and replace "twentyfourteen" with "my_theme", that will take care of all the custom functions and text domain for localisation. You need to do it with solid reliable software of course, but unless I'm forgetting something, it wouldn't break anything. What you are left with are just the comments and you can either leave them as is and delete/edit them as you go (you're probably not gonna use all files anyway). Or you can take a while to edit them all (and Pieter's search and replace would be a good starting point).

The CSS is actually the biggest problem I think, since you're probably gonna change the layout and classes/id's + there's a lot of code in there that your particular project probably wouldn't need. I tend to keep the Reset, Images and sometimes Repeatable pattern sections and work from there. You can always go back to the default twenty fourteen css file if you're missing anything.

I also like to clean up the functions.php and only leave in the functions I'll need. I think the main thing is, just grab what you need. Start with index, style, functions, page, archive, etc... + the includes and all of that. I usually don't need the post formats and such, you can get rid of a lot of files and lines of code that way.