I recently needed to modify a JavaScript file in a WordPress parent theme. The script was doing almost what I wanted, but not quite, so I wanted to make minor changes. In your case, you might want to entirely override a parent theme JavaScript file in your child theme, or even deactivate a parent theme JavaScript file altogether.

Let me start this with a disclaimer: custom templates go in your theme. That’s what themes are for: giving you interesting ways to display your WordPress site’s data.

We’ve talked about the WordPress template hierarchy before on WPShout a few different times. Here are the highlights:

In this week’s Quick Guide, we cover how to make a child theme in WordPress. You can — and sometimes should — just modify your CSS via the new “Additional CSS” feature in 4.7. But when you want to make bigger changes — especially to the PHP in the template files themselves, that’s not enough. That’s where you should be using a child theme in WordPress.

(Click to go straight to the hack »)

If you’re like a lot of WordPress users, you’re always hitting walls. You can manage your site: write content, upload photos, even add new contributors. What you can’t do is customize it. You wish you didn’t have to call up a developer to perform miracles like the following:

One request for help we hear far too frequently in our work at Press Up is: “I pressed an update button, and now my site doesn’t look right.” The cause is usually that people have customized the look-and-feel of their public site without using a child theme.