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Mariana Morales
Courses Plus Student 10,166 Pointsedit theme with css
Hi, I did a quickinstall of wordpress trought my hosting provider, then I downloaded a theme template and applied that. I would like to edit the css. Where I should do this? The template is http://wordpress.org/themes/arcade-basic
I am not want to be in trouble with updates
Thanks Mariana
4 Answers
Ryan Duchene
Courses Plus Student 46,022 PointsChris is right. If you want to make changes to the CSS in the theme, you're best off creating a child theme. The reason why is that, if you've made changes to a theme and the theme author updates the theme and you decide to update your theme to the latest version, then all your changes are wiped away. With a child theme, you won't have to worry about that.
However, if you want to make a quick tweak to the CSS and plan on making a child theme later, you can just go to Appearance > Editor in your WordPress admin area and select the stylesheet from the menu on the right, if it's not selected by default. I'll warn you, this editor is very basic, and it's missing a lot of the features that you take for granted in an editor like Sublime or TextMate or Treehouse's Workspaces.
Of course, you can always download the theme via FTP and edit it with your own text editor, but by then, you're better off just making a child theme.
Again, if you plan on doing anything serious (i.e., anything that you don't want wiped away with every theme update), I'd encourage you to build a child theme, or even build a complete theme from scratch. Treehouse has awesome courses on just that.
Chris Stuntz
13,160 PointsYou may be safest creating a child theme and updating it rather than editing the main (parent) theme. Then all updates would still be applied without any problems. You can find out more about child themes on the WordPress codex https://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes.
Jason Gottschalk
3,943 PointsIf you just want to edit CSS, you could install a custom CSS plugin.
Mariana Morales
Courses Plus Student 10,166 PointsThanks guys. It was really helpful for me.