The WordPress Twenty Ten Theme is able to be customized in many different ways.

The new default WordPress Theme, Twenty Ten, is a great theme because of its flexibility. The biggest problem is that if you are new to CSS and themes then it can be a nightmare knowing where to start. Well we have found something that will let you customize the Twenty Ten theme however you want in just minutes.

What Is A Child Theme

A child theme is like a clone of a parent theme. In this case the parent theme is the Twenty Ten theme and as you customize it you are creating a child theme. Its draws all the foundational code from the parent theme but the layout is different. It still needs the parent theme to be present as in essence it is still the same theme just with different skin.

It can be said that using a child theme is the perfect way to customize your Twenty Ten Theme because you do not risk screwing up the Theme’s core files.

Twenty Ten Child Themes

The Twenty Ten Theme by WordPress is also created with child themes in mind and serious Theme hobbyist have taken to develop rather good looking child themes for the Twenty Ten theme.

Taking things even further is yet another child theme called Twenty Ten theme Weaver. This child theme in itself has another 16 sub themes for you to choose from. It is like grandchild themes for the Twenty Ten.

Not only that, there are, included with the child theme, a lot of options for you to change the look and code settings of the grandchild twenty ten theme that you are using. You even get a real time screenshot of how your theme will look after the change. Alterations can be made immediately if you are not happy with your twenty ten theme child.

In the Advanced Options, you can add snippets of codes into the header of your new twenty ten theme, your footer and a couple of other widely used locations like before the </body> without actually having to open up the actual php files.

Once you have fully customized your twenty ten theme, you can actually store your ‘privatized’ theme so that you can restore the Theme if you decide to be adventurous a bit and change to a different Theme.

I must say that  the Weaver theme is very impressive and has become a mini framework of it’s own fro the Twenty Ten Theme. And remember, it is free. And it never gets out dated for the Twenty Ten theme core files which will always be part of any WordPress updates.

Additional Customizations for th Twenty Ten Theme

Once you have finished with the looks of your new twenty ten theme you can then start adding different widgets to customize even further.

But what makes widgets in Twenty Ten theme special are the widget areas. Most themes give users one or two widget areas while here there are six of them.

For WordPress newbies, you can use widgets by dragging and dropping them onto the widget areas that you want. My personal favorite is the Text widget because you can put customizable codes here.

Thats how I got my listings at the bottom of http://msitools.info/

Just remember to hit the “Save” button after writing down the code.

Another nice thing about WordPress 3.0 and Twenty Ten theme in terms of widgets support is the existence of the “Inactive Widgets” area. In the previous version of WordPress, deactivating a widget meant losing its settings. Now you can temporarily deactivate widgets while retaining their settings by dragging them to this area.

So watch the video and learn hot to customize your Twenty Ten Theme.

Customize Twenty Ten Theme