Creating child-theme from other template files

Question

I’ve created the child-theme of Kiyoshi theme with the style.css file and functions.php, but now I want to modify the structure files which are put in inc/structure – how can I do this?

Copying the inc/structure folders and modifying the files didn’t work. Putting them outside any folders absolutely destroyed the whole theme (if You change and put footer.php in the same hierarchy as style.css for example, it just disappears from the web). Should I use some function in those files so WordPress will load them instead of the main files? The author of the theme didn't respond for over a month.

Here's how it looks:

Answer 1

For your specific theme this question cannot be answered without analyzing all template files. More in general, a theme structured like this is almost impossible to make a child theme for.

Take footer.php. If you just put that in your child theme it will be called at the appropriate moment. But if that file tries to call templates from the inc-folder and you haven't moved those as well, nothing might be displayed.

The other way around, if the thing you want to change is in one of those inc-files, you can put it in the right folder in your child theme, but it won't be called if footer-php is still in the parent directory, from where it will call the parent inc-file.

To complicate things even further, any inc-file may be called from several parent templates. So to change a single thing in one inc-file, you would have to move several parent templates and, as a consequence, all the other inc-files that are called from the parent templates.

Anyway, you may end up copying the complete parent theme to the child folders to keep things working and you might as well change the parent theme itself.