Roots WordPress Theme Customization: Hack the original or child theme it?

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The Roots WordPress Theme offers a number of nice benefits. Chief among them:

1. integration of the HTML5 Boilerplate
2. prettying up WordPress’s paths to images, RSS feeds, etc.

But here’s the catch: I’d like to modify a few things — particularly un-hook the CSS frameworks, so that I can strip the CSS down to my own preferred defaults.

To customize and cut down the CSS overhead in Roots Theme, it looks like the best approach is to hack the theme itself rather than try to child theme it.

From the Roots Theme documentation:

Support for child themes was a popular request (#18) and Roots is now compatible with them.

Using a child theme would allow you to keep Roots intact and up to date, while customizing it. There is a tradeoff however. One of the philosophies behind Roots is to be clean and simple which is why we rewrite URLs in the form of /wp-content/themes/roots/ to /css, /js, etc. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work with child themes.

Roots will automatically detect if the active theme is a child theme. If it is, the clean URL rewriting will be disabled and get_stylesheet_directory_uri() will work as usual. …

One of Roots’ main benefits is the default stylesheet we include. To preserve this, it will always be included by default and will not be overwritten. There’s a few solutions to this:

• Edit functions.php so that it isn’t included
• Edit the actual Roots style.css file to remove/change whatever defaults you want
• Just redeclare CSS in the child’s style.css and use the cascading feature of CSS

via Child theme – GitHub.

Too bad that this will also hold up my desire to quickly child-theme my resulting code.