Newbie Question: can I change a theme's section without hard coding?

Just started to try wordpress, not as easy as I thought it would be, maybe it is just that I am too used to Joomla?

Anyway, I was working on the default theme "Twenty Seventeen". It has a fullscreen picture at its landing screen, which is called "header media". For learning purpose, I want to change this section to a "custom html" just like in Joomla. But I couldn't find where to do this. So how do I do it? It seems to be something that is fixed in the theme and you can't change it without hardcoding PHP files, am I right?

Just started to try wordpress, not as easy as I thought it would be, maybe it is just that I am too used to Joomla?

Anyway, I was working on the default theme "Twenty Seventeen". It has a fullscreen picture at its landing screen, which is called "header media". For learning purpose, I want to change this section to a "custom html" just like in Joomla. But I couldn't find where to do this. So how do I do it? It seems to be something that is fixed in the theme and you can't change it without hardcoding PHP files, am I right?

• theme-twenty-seventeen

Share Improve this question asked Mar 1, 2019 at 3:02 shenkwenshenkwen 13111 silver badge99 bronze badges

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You can hard-code it to PHP file, but you don't have to edit the original theme files. Instead, you can create a child theme.

First, you create a folder and name it to your liking. For example my-theme Then create a style.css file inside that folder.

At the very top of that CSS file, you write this code:

/*
Theme Name: My Theme
Template: twentyseventeen
*/

Now you should be able to activate that theme from the administration area.

To override a theme file, you just need to create a file with the same name as the original one, inside your theme directory.