customizing

One of the basic elements of WordPress best practices is to use a Child Theme. This allows you to make customizations to your theme without worrying about losing those changes when the theme author releases an update.   It’s simple to set up and should be a standard practice when setting up a new site.

This example will create a child theme of the WordPress default theme Twenty Seventeen.  The purpose of this exercise is to help you get a custom child theme so you can store custom functions for customizing WP-Members.  It is not intended to be a complete process of developing child themes and custom template files.  There are plenty of those resources available on the Internet, starting with the WordPress Codex.

The functions.php file is an important element in customizing WordPress.  It is also an important element in terms of customizing and integrating WP-Members into your site.

While you are not required to do any customization to get WP-Members to work on your site (it is, after all, a plugin), to leverage the power of the framework and thus make it look professional and seamless on your site, you will need to have some knowledge of the functions.php file.