We'll start off the evening with a review of the results of our 2012 survey along with our plans and some exciting announcements for 2013. This is going to be a great year for our meetup group! After that short presentation, we'll dive into our main topic for the evening, presented by Joe Chellman:

Easy Customization via Child Themes

Most WordPress themes come with helpful options for changing colors, fonts, and other visual bits in the administrative dashboard. That said, let's face it, no theme is 100% perfect. In this talk, I'll show an approach (what I think is the best one) for dealing with this problem: making a child theme. We're going to use the newly-released Twenty Twelve theme as the example, but this process will work on any theme, even commercial ones from Themeforest or the like. Making a child theme is kind of like having your cake and eating it too: you get all the advantages (and hard work) the original theme authors put into your theme, but you can make your customizations in an upgrade-safe manner.

Who Is This For?

This talk is intended for people who have worked with WordPress before. I assume you've installed themes before, but I do not assume you know anything about how to make theme yourself. We're going to start with a fresh WordPress installation, show how to make a child theme from scratch, and make a couple of basic changes we could not otherwise have made. There will be some CSS and other acronyms demonstrated, but you don't have to know any of that in advance.

Who Is This Guy?

Joe Chellman is a web designer, developer, and trainer (and drummer) based in Los Angeles. He has been working on the web since the mid-90s, and using WordPress since before version 1.0. You can see some of his work on the web at http://www.shooflydesign.org/ and follow him on twitter @shooflydesign (http://twitter.com/shooflydesign).