I´m glad to announce the release of the new Divi Children plugin. Divi Children is the easiest way to create a Divi child theme, and it´s free!
This plugin is pretty straightforward to install and use, and no settings are needed after activation. Once you have created your Divi child theme you can deactivate the plugin. or even delete it if you do not plan to do anything else with it on that site.
Installation
Divi Children gets installed just like any other plugin. Download the plugin zipped file from the plugin page and save it anywhere in your computer, then from your WordPress Admin area go to Plugins > Add New. Once on the Install Plugins page, upload the plugin file to install it and finally activate it.
Creating a new Divi child theme
Once you have activated the plugin, you will see a new Divi Children option under the Appearance section on your Admin area menu. A form will then appear when you click on it.
This form opens within the tab Create New Divi Child Theme and has been filled with information about you and your site. You can change whatever you want from the default values, and then you just need to hit the Create Divi Child Theme blue button.
That´s all!
You will notice that some fields on the form are used to customize the footer of your child theme. The current year displayed on the footer credits of your child theme will always keep updated thanks to a function included in the functions.php file created by the plugin for your new Divi child theme.
The plugin allows you to choose the name to be displayed on the footer credits and the URL for that link. It also lets you change the Powered by WordPress text, or you can just remove that text along with the WordPress link if you want to.
Make sure you have Divi already installed in your site before attempting to activate your new Divi child theme.
Changing the Divi child theme screenshot
The plugin uploads a default screenshot for your new child theme, but you can change that screenshot at any time. That´s what the other tab (Change Screenshot) is for.
Of course, you need to have created at least one Divi child theme on your site before you can change its screenshot. If you click on the Change Screenshot tab before you have a Divi child theme, the plugin will warn you and it won´t let you do anything but to go and create your child theme first:
To upload your new image for the screenshot, you can either use the Media Uploader by clicking the “Upload or Choose Image” button, or paste the URL to your image in the provided field.
Select the child theme to be changed (you may have more than one Divi child theme if for example you´re testing different tweaks in separated child themes) and then just hit the blue button. The default screenshot previously created by the plugin will be removed and your image will be uploaded and renamed as the screenshot for that theme.
Conclusion
As you have seen, Divi Children will allow you to focus on your creativity and forget about the tiresome parts of the process of creating the child theme.
I hope you enjoy this new plugin, and please provide some feedback once you have tried it!
- New Divi Children 3.0.10 update released - April 7, 2022
- New Divi Children 3.0.7 version for WordPress 4.9 - November 15, 2017
- Understanding Divi Children Output Mode - October 11, 2017
Thank you for this marvellous gift.
You´re welcome. Please stay tuned, you´ll love the new version of the plugin, coming soon.
hi Luis?… I have a problem.. first, my DIvi is behaving strangly.. the builder for the front page is now gone, and on the the other pages, its ok (so now I cant build my front page with out using the front end builder), and somehow, during the same period ( I guess!) my Divi child them took a crap.. it was vers 2.0.8, and it wont activate anymore.. keeps saying the stylesheet is missing.. any guesses to why this might be happening? Im afraid to uninstall Divi, cuz it might break on me, and also afraid to update WordPress without a child theme..
Hi there. Divi Children is a plugin (used to create child themes), not a child theme itself. That´s probably why you´re getting the missing stylesheet message.
Luis, the fact that Divi is so customizable, what would be the benefit of using child themes if you are not touching the root files?
It all depends on what you want to achieve. It is true that Divi is highly customizable, but there´s room for much more customization if you want your site to look different from others. And that´s the approach I took for the future of my Divi Children plugin: it will allow you to further customize Divi directly from the Theme Customizer. You can get a sneak peek on my post Divi Children 2.0 sneak peek: Customizing Divi even further, without code.
I used your plugin to create a child them. I used ftp to pull down the files then modified the style.css to change the color of the footer. The first issue is that the child css did not take precedence. To beat this I added “!important” to force it, but the problem is that the default black is still underneath causing the color I want to use look different. Do you have a suggestion to fix this problem?
Hi Brian,
I´m sorry to hear that you´re having trouble. I don´t know if you´re talking about the main footer or the bottom part of the footer. In any case these lines should work (with XXXXXX = your hex color code):
For the main footer:
#main-footer { background-color: #XXXXXX !important; }For the bottom part:
#footer-bottom { background-color: #XXXXXX; }The goods news is that Divi Children 2.0 will allow you to customize every part of your child theme´s footer (background colors, text colors, paddings…) without using code, watching the changes go live by means of the Theme Customizer! You have a sneak peek on this post.
Let me know if you still have any problems to customize your footer.
Luis,
I was missing #footer-bottom. That fixed the issue. My next question is how do I make the footer menu and social media icons appear. These are both setup to display already and were showing up prior to adding the child theme. How can I make these reappear?
My social icons disappeared when I updated to Divi 2.0. The code I used to fix that is shown on my post Updating my site to Divi 2.0 – My own experience.
About the footer menu, what do you mean by that? Did a menu you used in a footer widget disappear? In that case, check the appropriate widget. You may need to add your custom menu to it again (from your WordPress Dashboard, no code involved).
Thanks for creating this… There is really no logical legitimate excuse for Elegant themes not to build in “footer editing” into their Epanel for all the themes when we’re paid members. It’s an absurd and shameful self promotion, and I think it’s unreasonable. Thank you for making this easy…
Luis….Thank you so much for creating this plugin for Divi….I have needed to do this for quite some time but just never seemed to find the time. Much obliged to you for sharing with the community of divi users….
Thank you for your appreciation. I´m glad to be of help.
We discovered that your plugin needs an update for the new version of Divi – The social links for the footer disappear in the created child theme…
I know, Scott, and I´m sorry about that.
My problem is that I have a major update (Divi Children 2.0) almost ready, which will include a lot of new features. The latest Divi update caught me in the middle of final testing and then several things had to be changed. I´ve finally decided not to release an intermediate version and to go for the whole thing with Divi Children 2.0.
So I have to aplogize and ask for a little patience on your side. I promise it will be worth it!
Hi Luis… I’m just checking in, wondering if you have an estimated release date yet?
Hi again, Scott.
It is almost ready. It took me a while to include a new feature to allow the installation or update of the new Divi Children Engine (the code that makes use of the WordPress Customizer) for any existing Divi child theme (either created by an earlier version of the Divi Children plugin or manually created by the user). There are lots of different possible situations that had to be sorted out, like a child theme having custom functions already created, existing footer template, custom CSS already present in the stylesheet, and so on.
I´m finishing the last new feature to be packed in version 2.0: “Update Footer“. This will create a new footer template directly from the footer.php of the Divi version you have installed in your site at any moment (therefore being always compatible with it). Also, that child footer.php will include a function to generate the footer credits that will work with the WordPress Customizer. That means that you will be able to change your footer credits whenever you want.
As soon as I finish that last feature I´ll do some little final general testing and I´ll release version 2.0. I expect that to happen during next week.
That’s great to hear, thank you for answering! I’ll keep an eye out…
so… Has there been any progress?
Sure, Scott.
Divi Children 2.0 was released on August 13.
I´m surprised you didn´t get the release post through your email subscription.
Nice to hear, Luis, thank you!
How do I delete a custom CSS Class I may have created by mistake? Is that possible at all?
Hi Kunal,
You can´t delete it as for the current version. You can use it for another purpose or just not use it at all, it won´t do any harm to your site because it will only take a few bytes from your resources. And you can always hide the Customizer settings associated to that class by means of the Divi Child Settings Control section of the Customizer.
I’m running divi. 2.12
I downloaded a new zip of your child from here http://divi4u.com/divi-children-plugin/ and uploaded without unzipping – When I tried to use it, I get this message –
“The package could not be installed. The theme is missing the style.css stylesheet.”
So… I tried a manual unzip / manual upload tot the themes folder, where it ends up listed like this –
Broken Themes
The following themes are installed but incomplete. Themes must have a stylesheet and a template.
Name Description
divi-children-2.0.0 Stylesheet is missing.
What’s up?
Hi Scott,
Divi Children is a plugin, not a child theme. You´re trying to install a plugin as if it were a theme. Please read this post to get things clear.
DUH – I knew that – guess i had a brain freeze… thank you Luis and feel free to delete my stupid comment ;)I
You´re welcome, Scott
As you saw, you didn´t need your brain to freeze to get that confusion. That´s one of the reasons that made me write the clarifying post, too many people getting confused and taking the plugin for a packed child theme. I guess I´m the one to blame for not making things clear enough from the beginning.
Hi Luis,
I downloaded and activated the plugin on a friend’s site. Divi Children is now listed under Appearance, and when I click on it I get a message saying “Great! You have the Divi theme already installed in your site.”.
But when I click on the tab “Create a new Divi child theme” – or any of the tabs for that matter – nothing happens. Is there something else I need to do?
I’m running WordPress 4.0 and Divi 2.1.4.
Kim
Hi Kim,
I´m sorry to hear you´re having trouble. I didn´t have the time to update this site to WordPress 4.0 yet, but I wanted to make sure and I´ve just checked compatibility of Divi children with WordPress 4.0 and Divi 2.1.4 on my test site and everything seems to be working ok.
If you´re unable to open and close the different tabs, it looks like a javascript issue. Why it happens in your case I can´t figure out, maybe some of the plugins used in that site is causing an incompatibility problem. Please check that the rest of the plugins are updated or try activating and deactivating them one by one.
Just curious, when you open Divi Children from Appearance, are you getting the “Create New Divi Child Theme” tab open and the rest of the tabs closed? And in that case, are you able to edit the fields you´re presented with on the form?
Hi Luis,
I’m not seeing anything on any of the tabs at all – they’re completely blank.
I’ll check out possible conflicts with other plugins tomorrow and let you know the results.
Many thanks,
Kim
Hi Luis,
Turns out to be a problem with the Social Sharing Toolkit – problem now sorted!
Thanks very much for your help.
Kim
I´m glad you solved it, Kim 🙂
The same thing happens to me. Inspector says there is a javascript error:
Uncaught Error: cannot call methods on tabs prior to initialization; attempted to call method 'div.panes > div'I guess this could be solved quickly in your plugin, as you first have check if those tabs are initialised before running any code.
Thank you for your input, Fabian.
I´ll check that out.
Hi Luis,
Me again. 🙂 This isn’t strictly a Divi Child question, but it does concern the child theme, so I thought I’d run it past you.
I’m having a problem overriding some Woocommerce files. For example, I want to change woocommerce/includes/wc-product-functions.php so that the cart reads “Buy now” rather than “Add to cart”.
I tested the code on the core file, so I know it works. But to avoid problems with updates I created a directory path in the child theme folder as follows: childtheme/woocommerce/includes/ and added the modified wc-product-functions.php file. But it doesn’t work.
Am I putting the file in the wrong place or dong something else wrong?
Many thanks,
Kim
Hi Kim,
That would work if you wanted to modify a file inside a directory of the parent theme. But you are trying to do it for a file within a directory of a plugin instead. That´s why you can´t make it work via the child theme.
That’s what I would have thought Luis. But the Woo documentation here http://docs.woothemes.com/document/template-structure/ suggests that you put the files into a directory in your theme rather than in the plugin?
Anyway, I have solved today’s problem by simply adding the code to the theme functions file. 🙂
Kim
What the Woo documentation says about that is for template files, not for functions files. But placing the function you´ve modified in your functions.php file as you did will work. I´m glad you were able to solve it.
OK – that’s useful to know. Thanks Luis! 🙂
Thank you for this plugin! I am having an issue though: I had started on a site and then added this plugin and activated the new child theme. I lost the boxed layout option! So, I deactivated the child theme and the plugin and reactivated the original Divi theme. Boxed layout didn’t come back, though the settings still show the boxed layout checked. Sooo, I started over and installed the new child theme first. Still no boxed layout. The design of this site really begs for the boxed layout. Suggestions? (This test site is hosted locally on Desktop Server)
Thanks!
Hi Kim,
I can´t really know what´s happening with your site, being hosted locally only.
All I can tell you is that I wanted to make sure and I´ve double checked both in this very site and in one of my Divi development local installations, and the boxed layout works alright with the child themes created by the plugin.
Are you still experiencing that issue?
Yes, I am. I used Desktop Server tfor my local installation to create a mock up for a client. I’m not a developer but I enjoy creating WordPress sites and I like Divi. And of course, I was thrilled to find this plugin! I switched to the new child theme AFTER I did a little work on it (including the boxed layout–maybe therein lies the problem?). I was just going to install again from scratch, but I have run out of my free virtual servers with Desktop and I just haven’t had time to create a desktop install using MAMP.
If when you say you did a little work including the boxed layout you mean you checked the boxed layout option in the Customizer, there should not be any problem at all. But if you tweaked code in order to get a permanent boxed layout it would be a different matter, depending on what you did before using the child theme.
In any case, you won´t need to start a new site from scratch. If you modified anything within the parent theme and you´re not happy with the results, you can always reinstall Divi. As for the child theme, you can create as many child themes as you want for your site using the Divi Children plugin. You can create a new child theme with a different name and swap child themes as much as you want, for example for testing purposes.
Thank you, Luis! The “little work” included just checking off the boxed layout and I had the home page looking pretty complete, but I will just reinstall. Thanks for responding!
If you don´t reinstall the whole site but just themes and plugins you won´t lose your homepage layout, that gets stored in your WordPress database. 🙂
Just wanted to say you rock. Though I followed wordpress and divi instructions on making child theme it just did not work. Use your plugin and BAM! Done!
Oh, my goodness! I cannot believe how timely the Divi Children plugin was! I had just recently created a new website with a different theme…. long, long story shorter…. some kind of hack or program error or? happened and I had to start over again. (This acatually happened 2x) Anyway, I decided to forget that theme and try Divi again. I am just getting started on it, but I am really liking how the site is coming together, but I had read, after all my previous problems, that I should use a child theme to avoid losing all my special work etc. but I could not see anywhere in the folders etc. that Divi had a child theme and did not know how to create one so…. not sure what I was going to do if there was an update. I notice there was an update this evening, so I decided to google “how can I make a child theme for Divi” and up your site popped and with a marvelous plugin for people like me who are just brave enough or dumb enough to try to make your own website without knowing code or much else! HA!!!! I downloaded the Divi Children plugin and it worked like a charm! I only had to add a background and a small menu change! Amazing!!! Honestly, a BIG blessing for me after all the problems and hours I have spent recreating this site. And I did run the Divi update! THANK YOU! I appreciate you smart, educated, experience computer guys! and girls!
Thank you very much, Jane.
I´m glad Divi Children helped you so much. That´s what it was created for!
Does this plugin still work with Divi 2.2? I’m trying it for the first time and when I click on Divi Children under Appearances I get the tabs at the top starting with Create New Divi Child Theme but no form appears below these tabs.
Thanks
Gary
Hi Gary,
The plugin works with Divi 2.2, but yours is an issue that somebody else has reported already using an earlier version of Divi.
I´m working on a fix for this (in fact I believe I´ve already solved it) that will be included in the coming version 2.1 of Divi Children.
However, I´m not able to reproduce the issue because for me, as for almost anybody else, everything is working alright. If you´re willing to test my fix please send me an email through the contact page and I will send you an intermediate version 2.0.1 of the plugin with that fix included.
Thank you so much for this plugin. I had issues with another plugin causing the child creation form to be missing, but once I figured out which plugin it was I was able to create my child theme and then reactivate my plugin. This will definitely help with the sites that I’ve created with the Divi theme if just for the ability to customize the footer text. Thank you!
Thanks, Susan.
Could you please let me know what plugin was causing the issue? I´m trying to find the way to get rid of these plugin conflict issues, but in most of the reported cases they were premium plugins I don´t use and therefore I don´t have access to. You can either reply to this comment or use my Contact page.
Hi,
I can’t seem to make the comments section work on only one page of the site. How do you do that? I went to screen options on a new site I am working on, and when I change it, it changes it for all pages. I have not added the divi child yet though…is that in there?
Thanks,
Lynn
Is this plugin still supported, and being updated to work with the latest Divi (2.6 at the time of asking)?
I can see that some cleverness is used to ensure the child theme can always continue to use the divi builder…..if I were to create a child theme the “manual” way, would the Divi builder not function properly?
Hi, Jeff.
Yes, you can use Divi Children with the current version of Divi.
If you create a child theme manually, you will be able to use the Divi builder as well.
For the second time I’ve tried to create a Child theme with Divi Children and even though I have Divi installed when I go to create a Child theme it asks to install Divi before you can create a Child Theme.
I have Divi installed yet if I uninstall either the plugin or Divi and then reinstall it still asks to install Divi.
Any help please.
Hi, Graham.
You probably have a non-standard Divi installation. Have you renamed the parent theme folder to anything different from “Divi”?
Hi Luis
I haven’t changed anything. I have been able to get it to work but only by installing an older version of Divi, then create the Child Theme and then update Divi.
I have just tried it again with the updated plugin but have the same issue. Again I had to install an older version of Divi to use the Plugin.
Hmm, that´s strange.
Do you want me to take a look at your site, Graham? Let me know if you do. You can send me an email via our Contact page.