WordPress, Carrington Build, and a Child Theme

One of the benefits of using WordPress to build a website is that you can change the look of a website usually in a few minutes. All you have to do is load and activate a new theme that contains all the code to modify your website.

However, being the geek I am, I always like tweaking something on the site. Maybe it is a color, or perhaps a column width. In this particulate case, I was adding Carrington Build by Crowd Favorite (http://crowdfavorite.com/carrington-build) to the website.

I love the functionality of the Carrington Build, but felt the theme that Crowd Favorite developed to highlight the feature was getting old. I had been using it for about four years on Nativity Church’s website (http://www.nativitycatholicchurch.net). Recently, I decided WordPress’ Twenty Fourteen theme might lend itself to the website nicely.

After installing the Carrington Build feature into the Twenty Fourteen theme (sorry but I cannot reveal the process since Crowd Favorite supplies this information to licensed customers only), I went into the WordPress Admin Panel, clicked on Appearance and then Themes. From there I found the Twenty Fourteen theme and Activated it. In a second or two, my new theme was running.

However, after a few minutes I noticed my RSS feeds were not showing the titles or dates. However, when I placed my cursor over the area where the title should be, the tile would appear. Thus, I knew everything was working and I needed to tweak a color on the titles since it appeared the titles showing as white on white.

Using Development Tool

The process of isolating the necessary CSS code was time consuming. (Partially because I do not regularly code websites, and partially due to the amount of tags used to code the site.)  Using Chrome Development Tools (it is built into Chrome – see https://developers.google.com/chrome-developer-tools/ for more information) I was able to isolate the necessary tags to change the title and date and wrote the necessary code:

.rss-date {
color: #41a62a;
}
.rsswidget, .widget-title a {
color: #41a62a;
}
li>.rsswidget {
color: #41a62a;
}

Because from time to time WordPress updates a theme to stay compatible with a newer version of WordPress, I created a child theme. If you directly modify the theme’s code, you often risk losing changes you make when you update because many files are overwritten. A child theme allows you to keep your changes.  Rather than write a long narrative on how to create a child theme you can visit WordPress’ Codex site at https://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes or simply search for “WordPress child theme” on your favorite search engine.

Once I created the child theme, I inserted the above code into the style.css file located in my child theme. After loading the changes and activating my child theme, I had my titles showing without fear of losing my changes. (I personally like using FileZilla (https://filezilla-project.org/ ) to move my files between computer and my web server. I also like and Notepad ++ (http://notepad-plus-plus.org/ ) as an editor.)

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