It’s actually a fairly straightforward way of enhancing and customizing an existing theme; it’s better than hacking at the original theme’s code because, should that theme get updated, your changes would be lost.

I have a website called the Daily Funnies where I’ve used this technique. In this case, the parent theme is called Genesis, a theme framework. If you follow that link, you’ll see that the basic Genesis theme is black and white. It offers very flexible page layouts, however, and is easy to customize.

I created a new theme called “Funnies.” This theme consists of a single file, style.css, that includes the parent Genesis stylesheet and then overrides some of the specific style rules. For example, I changed the navigation bar from black to a dark green, and then used green for links and other components of the site. The result is as you see it here:

(Note that, by the time you look at it, it might have changed a bit, as I am continuing to play with it.)

In addition to replacing or extending the stylesheet, you can use child themes to add new PHP functions (in the file functions.php) or even to replace the existing templates (for example, you might replace the home page with a new layout).

I’ve used WordPress for my personal blog for a several years (I’ve also played with TypePad and various other blogging systems, but that’s beside the point). In my job at Yahoo!, our bloggers got along with various home-brew systems for a several years, so we decided to move most of our professional bloggers to WordPress.

Many people have called WordPress a serious, enterprise-class blogging application (I’m not going to cite any sources here, mainly because I don’t fully agree with it). Yahoo!, of course, has a somewhat different opinion about what is a truly world-class solution for performance, security, and integrity.

WordPress is a best-of-breed blogging platform, which is why we chose it to use at Yahoo! It does, however, have serious architectural and structural problems that had to be overcome before it could be fully accepted as part of Yahoo’s Media infrastructure.

The story of how we created a highly scalable, fully redundant, extremely secure installation of WordPress at Yahoo! is the subject of a presentation that I have proposed for the South By Southwest Interactive festival in March, 2011.

Before that presentation makes it to the conference, however, it has to be voted on by the conference attendees. If you’d like to hear about this, go to the South By Southwest PanelPicker and vote! The presentation is called ”WordPress and Yahoo!: a marriage made in hell.”

I am not a hugely political beast. I am a registered Republican, and there are times when I regret that. I find that my personal opinions tend toward the middle of the road, and both Democrats and Republicans are often too extreme for me. And, I’m sure I don’t fully agree with Dan on everything, but I respect him as a person, as a business person, and as a thoughtful politician who earnestly desires to do good. He’s running a “come from behind” campaign against a well known, well-financed, and thoroughly experienced incumbent, Zoe Lofgren, and he has a lot of work to do to win this election.

A political campaign, especially for one as high-profile as a run for Congress, is essentially a non-profit business. It’s a business, however, that’s only operating for a very short time; in this case, the work of the campaign will be over by November 3rd.

Like all businesses, it needs a certain amount of infrastructure and technology to keep things running. In addition to setting up and managing Dan’s website (running WordPress 3.0.1, by the way), I’ve set up Google Apps on his domain, so that we now all have unified email, calendaring, and document sharing. I’ve set up a virtual phone system using My1Voice, and I’m running his Facebook page and his Twitter account, both of which get automatically generated posts via TwitterFeed.

I’ve still got a to-do list a mile long, and very little time to get things done. However, I have to admit that there’s a ton of free or low-cost applications out there on the web that can handle the vast amount of things we need to do. We’ve already hit some headaches—for example, we discovered a bug in Google Docs where, instead of creating a new document for you, it redirects you to a help page if you happen to be signed in to more than one Google account at the moment. My personal goal, however, is to be unnoticed; if I do my job well, then things should just work, and Dan can focus on the important issues of running his campaign.