Canvas is already a powerful theme, why bother with a child theme?
The (weird) thing about Canvas is that it doesn’t look great out of the box. In fact, if I were browsing themes and scrolled across Canvas, I’m not sure I would take a second look. Maybe it’s like a contractor walking through Home Depot: they see potential whereas we just see nuts, bolts, and wood. Canvas is similar. I know what it can do. But if you look at it, dear non-programmer-WordPress-designer friend, probably just see some boring content and a simple layout. Well, yep, that’s what it looks like.
What if someone spent a little time and make a theme that you could use with Canvas that retained all of Canvas’s power and potential and made it beautiful and maybe even added a few features or plugins to enhance the functionality? Then made it easy to use, install, and make live within minutes of buying it? Sounds good, right?
Woo recently came out with two child themes for Canvas, their first ever: Uno and Duo. They look (and work) great. But even more important, it shows that the “manufacturer” of the core theme (Canvas) is investing in child themes. So is there a future in child themes for Canvas? I suppose that depends on Woo and how Canvas fares against the other framework-ish themes out there. Personally, I think it’s a great theme, but there are lots of others out there worth checking out, too.
We’re busy creating a few new child themes for Canvas and we’ll put them up for sale here at WPU. We’ll have some friendly pricing to get started and see how they fare. Ready? We are too.
As a WordPress newbie a year ago I purchased canvas due to all the positive reviews I had read. However, I realized I was in over my head and was unable to achieve the design I had in my mind, despite resources such as those you offer. So I gave up and moved on to another theme.
However, I am starting a new project using Woo Sensei and I do not care for the style of the Woo themes that are compatible with Sensei. Canavas is compatible, so I think it would be great is someone developed a Canvas child theme that was geared towards selling online courses using Sensei.