Child Theme vs Duplicate Theme Renamed

Child Themes are useful for users who mainly want to make style changes to their Theme, but don’t want – or know how – to maintain the underlying code. Grokking PHP/WordPress Theme Development is an entirely different thing than grokking CSS.

Child Themes are also useful for users who want to implement minor functional changes to their Theme. This is especially useful for Themes that provide a lot of means for modification: action/filter hooks, pluggable functions, etc. Granted, such mods could just as easily be implemented via custom Plugin, but such a Plugin would only apply if the correct Theme is active, so it makes just as much sense to put this code in a Child Theme.

If you’re comfortable with maintaining a forked Theme, and find that your modifications exceed what would be reasonable for a Child Theme, then by all means: fork the Theme.

It all boils down to the method that is most beneficial to the individual end user.

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