I have been learning about WordPress’s child themes in the last few days. A child theme is a theme that extends an already-existing theme. At its most basic, a child theme consists simply of a CSS stylesheet that replaces the one supplied with the original theme.

It’s actually a fairly straightforward way of enhancing and customizing an existing theme; it’s better than hacking at the original theme’s code because, should that theme get updated, your changes would be lost.

I have a website called the Daily Funnies where I’ve used this technique. In this case, the parent theme is called Genesis, a theme framework. If you follow that link, you’ll see that the basic Genesis theme is black and white. It offers very flexible page layouts, however, and is easy to customize.

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I was recently asked (well, “cornered” may be a better word) to take over as the webmaster for Dan Sahagun for Congress.  Dan is an old friend of mine that I’ve known since I moved to California in 2000; he managed to win the Republican party primary for California’s 16th congressional district as a write-in candidate (the Secretary of State having disallowed enough signatures on his petition to prevent him from appearing on the ballot). In a very short time, I found myself not just the webmaster, but the “Director of Media Operations.” It’s a very high-sounding title, but it basically means I’m handling just about anything that involves media or infrastructure.

I am not a hugely political beast. I am a registered Republican, and there are times when I regret that. I find that my personal opinions tend toward the middle of the road, and both Democrats and Republicans are often too extreme for me. And, I’m sure I don’t fully agree with Dan on everything, but I respect him as a person, as a business person, and as a thoughtful politician who earnestly desires to do good. He’s running a “come from behind” campaign against a well known, well-financed, and thoroughly experienced incumbent, Zoe Lofgren, and he has a lot of work to do to win this election.

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