Hello!

It would be nice if Atahualpa supported child themes a little better. I'm getting tired of manually moving language files, header images and favicons on upgrades. Since the native WordPress feature of keeping these things in a child theme folder works for other themes, I see no reason why Atahualpa shouldn't support them. It is the WordPress recommended way of making changes to a theme after all.

For some reason Atahualpa detects the header image folder as /wp/wp-content/themes/atahualpa373/images/header/, even though my child them is located in /wp/wp-content/themes/atahualpadjurby/images/header/. The same is true for the favicon folder. Ideally, when there exists a folder in the child theme folder, the contents of that should be used instead of the main theme's. I.e., if there exists a favicon.ico file in /wp/wp-content/themes/atahualpa373/images/favicon/, it should be detected if I set favicon.ico as the favicon file name. An option would be to allow full URLs for the header and favicon.

Please fix this. Aren't you tired of the support questions on every new version, that could be avoided by supporting great WordPress features? Also, child themes allow for easy inclusion of custom functions in functions.php, custom css (if you don't want to store it in the options for some reason, version control maybe?), and probably other great stuff.

The concept of child themes do not require a parent theme to support it's use. The support for child themes is in WordPress core.

1. It will use the style.css fo the child theme
2. It will use the template file of the child theme if it exists, following the template hierarchy of WordPress
3. It will include the functions.php of the child theme. If the the new functions.php should just modify the existing functions, then all functions in the parent theme must be "pluggable".

There is no general rule that says if a file of other types than tempate files are found in the child theme, those should be used in favor of the ones in the parent theme.

A theme might check for and detect that it's called through a child theme, and then do those file checks itself. This would be som kind of explicit child theme support. But this will come at a performance penalty.

Better to allow for file paths to child theme folders in the rich theme options of Atahualpa.

The main problem with Atahualpa upgrading is that it uses it's own folders for media files. Those are removed and replaced by only the included files after an automatic upgrade. Twenty Eleven also uses header images, but they are uploaded to the media library.

A child theme of Atahualpa is the way to change the loop. After PHP was removed from options this is the only way, except modifying the theme files themselves.

Creatin of a child theme might be done by the end user by one click. A desired set of template files could be copied, and the user would be ready to edit them.

If then all PHP functions of Atahualpa was put inside a "if !function_exists()" block, then the child theme explicit support would be complete.