WOO finally comes out with a child theme for Canvas. Let’s have a look.

Uno, WOO Themes first Canvas child theme.

Uno, WOO Themes first Canvas child theme.

I’d been watching their blog for signs of life in the child theme arena for Canvas without too much hope. They had some reasoning in the past that it was too hard to manage or administer or I can’t remember exactly what the reasoning was to not do it, but they didn’t seem too gung-ho on the idea. Now they are. Which is great news.

This reinforces Canvas as WOO’s flagship theme. Woo hoo!

The focus on Uno is e-commerce. There’s the now inevitable (but very successful) hero image on the home page and then nicely displayed further products on the home page. The navigation, as per Canvas, goes nicely mobile friendly with smaller screens and the products responsively align to the screen size.

So why don’t I just try to re-create this on my own?

The theme looks like Canvas with a few customizations. Well, exactly. That’s precisely what a child theme does: customizes the parent (or framework) theme. So yes, you could have a go and certainly get to the point where Uno is now. But it becomes a time and cost balance: how long is it going to take you to get it to where they already have it and was it worth more than the $39 the child theme is going to cost? It’s up to you.

I suppose that they’ll keep their child themes up to date and we’ll be able to update them automatically through the WOO Updater interface so we should be OK on the updates front. Although, that said, child themes are supposed to be where we keep the customizations, so wouldn’t an update overwrite them? Yes, good point. Always a good idea to keep a backup of settings, CSS, and any other changes you’ve made to both Canvas and a child theme just in case.

In all, it’s a great start for WOO and Canvas and we’ll be looking forward to more child themes down the road.