Wordpress Child's Theme functions.php is not being read

Question

I have created a child theme from the Casper WP theme. It is called casper-child, the Casper parent theme is in a folder called "casper-master". Here is my child style.css file that is being read correctly (the background color does change to pink).

/*
Theme Name: Casper Child
Description: Child theme for Casper theme
Author: Grant
Template: casper-master
*/
body { background-color: pink; }

My problem is that my functions.php file is not being read/working.

My functions.php for my child theme is located here: /wp-content/themes/casper-child/functions.php

The parents functions.php file is at /wp-content/themes/casper-master/functions.php

The code I have in my child's functions.php is:

<?php
add_action( 'wp_enqueue_scripts', 'my_child_theme_scripts' );

function my_child_theme_scripts() {
     wp_enqueue_style( 'parent-theme-css', get_template_directory_uri() . '/style.css' );
}

The parent theme is still not being loaded. Any ideas why? I can't seem to get anything to work in the functions.php file, no custom functions with redirects or anything. It feels like the file is not being read.

Answer 1

Most of the Wordpress documentation has add_action after the function, not sure if this will make a difference at all.

Also in your example there is no closing ?>

Answer 2

Turns out the Casper theme needs a specific Casper Child Theme in order to create a child theme. I found it here: http://hackersome.com/p/lacymorrow/casper

Answer 3

I am having a issue installing this child theme to my web host. The dash tells me this as the child theme is not even selectable.

I created my child theme on my local machine. Therefore I know it is working on my local environment. I did not change the core,only css styles and moved the navigation.

Local development running 4.1.5, host running 4.2.2

Answer 4

Under the documentation on the top of the style.css in the -child theme capitalization creates issues on the web server, not my local environment. For reference I am using MAMP.

For some reason the theme would not install, but then it would install sometimes. I could never activate the theme as I would always get the 'Parent theme is not installed.' It was the entire time.

I upgraded Wordpress on my local environment to the same on the host from 4.1.5 to 4.2.2. The result is that my local environment had no issues. I had the same problem.

It came to changing the capitalism in the style.css in the child theme:

From

/**
 Theme Name:Casper-child
 Template:Casper
 Author: Todd 
 version: 0.1
 */ 

To

/**
 Theme Name:Casper-child
 Template:casper
 Author: Todd
 version: 0.2
 */

Under Template:Casper had to be lowercased for the web host. Weird and tedious problem. Wasted few hours to figure this out, hope this helps someone :)

Answer 5

Oh, yes this is a little detail that will screw you up moving from MAMP to LAMP. OSX isn't case sensitive.

"casper" and "Casper" are the same to OSX, but different on Linux.