Does anyone have experience publishing multiple child themes? We have a website that was originally set up by an agency, and for some reason they branded the theme with our website’s branding. When I went to create a second child theme, it was a bit confusing since all I was seeing was the branding from the first child theme.
I was able to design the second child theme, but I’m worried about publishing it because I don’t want to break the first website. Does anyone have any insight on this? Are there any steps I can take to ensure that publishing the second child theme won’t affect the first website?
Hey @PBifaro,
Thanks for posting in the Community!
Tagging in a couple of Community experts here to see what insight they might have for us on best practices when publishing this second child theme! @eburnaman and @jeremymandle - any thoughts?
Shane, Senior Community Moderator
@PBifaro - This is perhaps a bit of a surprising journey, since the “master” theme files are most often set to read-only these days. But this was not always the case I recall.
I don’t know of any limits, but mutiple child themes in the design tool are definitely possible, probably the norm actually. But for each web page implemented, you have to pick a module based from your favorite theme whch may not be the default. And, of course, your theme settings will not be consistent across old and new themed pages which could be a little disorienting if you rely extensively on these.
@SteveHTM covered quite a lot, here a few additional informations:
The amount of possible child-themes is limited by your Marketing Hub or Content Hub tier:
free and Starter: 1 child theme
Professional: up to 5 child themes
Enterprise: up to 10 child themes
If you want a “self contained” child-theme (assets of it don’t interfere with other child-themes or the parent theme, you need to clone the desired asset (template, module, file…) to the individual child-theme.
Example:
You bought a theme from the marketplace. This is your parent theme. If you create just a child theme of it and call it a day, the risk that something will get out of overwritten if the theme provider changes something and you just update it is quite high. If you copy the button module (just an example) from the parent theme to the child-theme any updates made by the theme provider to this button module won’t affect your child-theme version of it.
If you want to have a setup like
Main brand website
Sub-brand website
Sub-brand website
in one portal,
every sub-brand (and main brand) should - idealy - get it’s own child-theme with all assets.
Something I’ve done in the past was:
Custom theme as parent theme with all templates and modules
Several child-themes of the parent theme with brand specific templates and modules
The user of a child-theme could use the parent theme modules but also the child-theme modules.
The modules were set up in a way that only color and font informations were changed/applied automatically depending on the theme usage.
For instance, if the button module was used in the parent theme, it was displayed green, but if it was used in child-theme a it became red. Everythign fully automated and without the need of manually selecting colors as this might become a huge design issue.
Depending on your setup and requirements, you can copy over the theme fields.json as well. This will allow you to have the same (child-) theme settings as the parent theme but with different values. (You should copy the required CSS assets to the child theme as well)