Extensive customizations using child themes

We talked a lot about how you can customize your theme using the customizer, using hooks, and installing additional plugins. There’s one more common way to customize your theme that’s really useful for sites that want to customize every aspect of their store. That’s using a child theme (https://developer.wordpress.org/themes/advanced-topics/child-themes/).

I like to think of a child theme as a second draft. You choose a theme to be the parent and then you modify from there. You could choose any WordPress theme as the parent, and I would suggest starting with one of the three themes we already covered in this chapter.

Then, in the child theme, you can customize the styling (CSS) and the functionality (the hooks).

One of the most important benefits of a child theme is that it allows you to update the parent theme and bring in new changes while still keeping your modifications intact.

An additional benefit is...