How to Install and develop child themes for SWIFT

This tutorial will guide you through the process of developing and installing child themes for SWIFT. After reading this short tutorial, you should be able to develop child themes for SWIFT and share it with the ever-growing community of SWIFT users.

The concept of child themes in SWIFT is entirely different from the other WordPress themes. Unlike in other themes, you don’t need any knowledge of CSS, HTML or PHP (A little knowledge of CSS will help, but not compulsory). You just need to have a good taste to design beautiful child themes for SWIFT.

1. First get the latest version of SWIFT from the downloads page and install it. Here is a general tutorial on how to install any WordPress theme. If you are already using SWIFT, install the new version and take a backup of export text from the import export page. see screenshot of point number 11.



2. After you install SWIFT, goto the design options page. On the background images tab, fill in the name for your child theme. Choose a unique name so that there is no clash with other child themes of SWIFT. Don’t use spaces or special characters in your theme name. All the images used in the child theme will be stored in this folder. Child theme name is case-sensitive, you have to use the exactly same name for the folder.



3. After you have filled the name of your theme, goto the layouts tab and select the header style and the layout style.
4. Now goto the fonts tab and select the default font and font sizes for your theme.
5. Now goto the colours tab and select the colours for each element, click save changes and visit your blog to see if the colours you selected are applied correctly.
6. Once you are done with picking the colours, create a folder in wp-content/themes/SWIFT/child-themes/, for example folder name is “kill-bill” for kill bill theme.





7. Copy the images you selected to use as backgrounds to the folder you created in the above step.
8. Goto the backgrounds tab and enter the background image names. You should add them along with their extension like header-background.png, headerbackground.jpg.
9. If you are using patterns and want to repeat it horizontally, select repeat-x from the drop down menu and repeat-y if you want to repeat it vertically. Leaving it blank will repeat the image in both directions.
10. Click save changes and double-check if you picked the colours for all the elements according to your colour scheme. Be sure to check that you selected the correct colours for sliders,magazine boxes,comments template, subscribe box, author info at the end of the post on single pages,post meta, footer and copyright notice.
11. Now goto import export options page and copy Swift Design Options and paste it in a text file named import.txt and save it to the folder created in step 6.



12. Include a short read me file about the author and the theme.
13. Now zip the folder and share it with the fellow Swiftler’s.

Installing child themes of SWIFT.

1. Download the child theme to your desktop and extract it. Upload the extracted folder to wp-content/themes/SWIFT folder.  Swift theme folder name should be SWIFT (case-sensitive, all caps)
2. Now goto swift import export options page and copy the contents of the “import.txt” file and paste it in Swift Design Options and click save changes.
3. That’s it, you activated the new child theme.

Note: Before you make try any child themes, take a backup of  your theme options. Taking backup is very simple, just copy paste the option into a text file. To import the options, paste the text string on the import/export page and click import

For advanced developers

To add images to the div that are not included in the background images tab or to place the background image in a particular location use Custom CSS option. Image path will be ../../themes/SWIFT/child-theme-name/background.png

There was problem importing when quotes were used in Custom CSS, so avoid using ‘ and “ in custom CSS

To position a background image you can use the background position property.

[css]body{background-position: 50% 100%}.[/css]

Tip: If you want to use a image in the bottom like the one in Kill Bill theme, create a canvas of width 1600px or more and leave 960 wide area in the middle.