But as a developer working on someone's site, why not change your process to ALWAYS make a child theme? Unless you're making a 'for them' custom theme, why would you not follow best standards and practices? YOU know you should do it :) So do it from the get go.

Think of it from a practical perspective.

These are people who pay you. What's going to cause you the least amount of 3am phone calls?

1) Make a child theme
2) DISABLE the in-admin editor so they can't break their plugins and themes
3) Have an SLA about response times and costs

Establishing a professional relationship with people who hire you is as much for the protection of your sanity as it is for making money :)

If you're not charging people and they're not paying you for this kind of thing, then you don't have a professional business relationship, you have an abusive one.

With the time past the plugins that create child themes proved that they can do a good job, so you are at a plugin install away from your needed feature.

I'm sure I'm not the best person to comment what needs and what shouod not be in wp core but this particular feature is covered perfectly by plugins, make your life easy, use the plugins.

This message has been written so pls blame any writting mistakes on the phone's keyboard and not my English.

Best!

I can call him and ask for his FTP info which I PROMISE he won't know, or a simple button would be a really great feature. I'm about to code a few lines in his current theme to mkdir and touch the files.

The fact that you provide the ability to edit the files but put a big warning on it saying "Editing these files is discouraged" and a button that says "Proceed" indicates that you do have certain developer-centric features. Another button right there saying "Generate child theme" would be perfect. (PS, the Appearance "Editor" feature is a feature of WP and not Jetpack right? I always have Jetpack so sometimes I'm not sure where the line is drawn.)

The feature is very simple, should be a fairly low impact feature (from a QA/future dev perspective), and really wouldn't hurt anything if a user did call it on accident I would think. Perhaps some extra check to see if their current theme is a blank Child theme so it doesn't continue to make nested children would be nice, too.

Thanks

https://wordpress.org/ideas/topic/one-click-child-themes-theme-template-page-creation

Having updated plugins in the repo is a different thing then the main topic of this thread and I don't know what to say about it.

As I said, this is only my opinion, you can disagree but if you do, I'll really like to know your opinion.

Thanks

More specifically to the idea posted here, I think this would be something that would be used by the majority of WP users. And would warrant the addition to the WP Core. And remove the need for a plugin.

As relating to that particular plugin (which I prefer of those that are offered), I was looking at it from a marketing prospective to new WordPress.org users.

If a newbie-type user searches for plugins that easily create a Child Theme, he/she probably will skip over a plugin that is labeled over 2 years old; and choose a recently updated option instead (even if it's not the best plugin).

That said, why not just have the Core provide a wp-admin/themes.php/current theme/child theme/ button instead.

I don't think that the fact that the plugin wasn't updated in 2 years is an issue, a new child theme is just a folder and file creation with minimum data inside it... why should it have been updated in the last 2 years?

If this option is included in the Core, then users won't have to rely on plugin authors to keep their products updated.

Of the current plugins offered, I prefer this one:

http://wordpress.org/plugins/one-click-child-theme/

because of Where it displays the option, to build a child theme. The downside to the plugin is that it hasn't been updated in over 2 years.