andym193

Thanks for the reference and your advice, its much appreciated. I am also using the genesis framework. Grandchildren themes would be ideal but I wouldn’t want to use it if wordpress are not supporting it.

The only thing that will be different between my child themes is css
edits and images. (I’m not interested in a css plugin/ jetpack as I am a
digital artist – I want to create my own skin themes and I like to give users a lot of variety). So any php changes (and main css changes to the framework) I need to just do once.

Would putting code in the parent theme the best way to go do you think. So if I do an upgrade to the genesis framework, I should just replace the files each time.

I would prefer not to use a plugin for sharing functions between all child themes, would it be okay to add this to the parent theme functions.php all at the bottom, then if I upgrade, I could just copy and paste my added functions to the new upgraded function.php at the bottom again.

So just to clarify,
would you suggest using the parent theme to make these main changes rather than something like for example, adding header.php to all child themes and just putting:
<?php include ‘../default/header.php’; ?>
Then create a default directory, and make my main changes to php files in there.

Yes I know, thats why it would be even easier if I could edit the header.php, and functions.php in the parent theme so I can just make the changes to the parent theme. however, because of problems that I will have upgrading the parent theme, I need to find another way around this, that was the best I could come up with.

If your familiar with magento ecommerce, Something similar to this is possible – it has the base directory (similar to wordpress parent theme)
then you can create a default theme (this is where you can do all the major changes) then you can create another directory which is perfect for skinning the different stores, so Magento goes – ‘base’ then ‘default’ then ‘theme’ –
so it create 3 levels of fallbacks, that is perfect for someone that has lots of different designed stores. If you create a lot of stores with your own designed themes this setup is a life saver.

Ideally I need wordpress to be like magento and go: ‘parent’ then ‘default’ then ‘child’. But it can’t do that as it can only go ‘parent’ then ‘child’, which is bad news for my plans. So I’m trying to work out a another way around it like I mentioned with the php includes.

Thanks guys.