[wp-trac] [WordPress Trac] #43379: Allow themese to know if they are the parent or child theme

[WordPress Trac]

#43379: Allow themese to know if they are the parent or child theme
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 Reporter:  denvercoder9     |      Owner:
     Type:  feature request  |     Status:  new
 Priority:  normal           |  Milestone:  Awaiting Review
Component:  Customize        |    Version:
 Severity:  normal           |   Keywords:
  Focuses:                   |
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 I've seen a few tickets from a long long time ago that would have
 potentially provided the functionality, however the solutions introduced
 were designed to solve completely different problems.

 It would be convenient for a parent theme to know it's a parent or a child
 theme to know it's a child.

 For example if I was to create a theme that was intended to support
 parent/child theme functionality but was also built around specific
 conventions.

 As an example for a theme there is a config.php file that should be loaded
 for both paren/tchild, the configurations in this file would be different
 for each theme. Let's suppose there are a lot of conventions like this and
 I want the themes to automatically load  different files without requiring
 the person setting up the child theme to update all instances of
 get_template_directory() with get_stylesheet_directory(). Maybe as another
 example is maybe the parent them provides a file for hooking into gravity
 forms if it exists. As a convention I would like the child theme to
 organize it's code in a similar way and specific file is used to for
 gravity forms hooks.

 I think this could be solved in a variety of ways. Possibly providing a
 way to scope variables to a specific theme.

 Or to create a utility function to identify if the current working theme
 is currently active. As I understand it code from a theme should only be
 running if it is a parent theme or a child theme. If the current working
 file is not in the active theme than it would inherently be a parent theme
 file.

 While there is the ability to provide workarounds, the only ways I have
 identified often require expensive file system calls, which I'm hoping,
 with my limited knowledge of how core handles parent/child a solution
 could be introduced without these types of calls.

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Ticket URL: <https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/43379>
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