You may be tempted to dive right into modifying a theme’s templates or stylesheets to get things to look exactly as you want, but this can be problematic down the road, especially if you are modding a theme for a client.

Modified themes will revert to their out-of-the-box state or experience problems if they are updated. You could opt never to update the theme, but this is not a good choice for several reasons:

1. Updates include important bug fixes, security updates and WordPress compatibility updates. You don’t want to be without these!
2. We can’t support any issues with your theme if it is not up to date
3. You may miss out on new features we are adding all the time

Alternatives to Direct Modification

1. Create a child theme instead of modifying the base theme files to save yourself time and energy. You may still need to make maintenance changes to your child theme based on our updates, but a child theme allows you to update the base theme without fear that it will destroy your work. See
   How to Create a Barebones Child Theme for Obox Themes
2. Keep an update log of all the changes you make so you can reference it later if you have to re-edit a file that was replaced by an update. For serious modders, start a repository on github or bitbucket to compare changes and manage your versions against ours. See How to Track Update Changes and Maintain Modifications
3. Use the Custom CSS field or a custom.css file to re-style your theme, and take advantage of any options available in the Customizer. Where changes are purely cosmetic and do not involve adding  PHP or HTML, just about 99% of anything you might need to do can be accomplished through CSS alone rather than changing templates. This includes hiding elements, re-aligning or re-sizing.  See How to Find the ID or class name for an element to use in Custom CSS
4. Search the solutions database! We have a large collection of tips and articles on modifying specific things across some of our things based on common requests or input from modders and obox users. If you can’t find what you are looking for here or have one or two changes you want to make to a theme, drop us a note in the Support Forums. We are happy to offer general advice or point you in the right direction. If you have a Premium Support package, we will even explain how obox functions work or explain where you need to make changes if needed. Please note, we cannot develop mods for you or troubleshoot/test child theme issues. See the following link for details on what we can assist with.

Need Professional Help?

Where can I get help with modifications or advanced Custom CSS?