If you plan on editing your BuddyBoss theme at all, we strongly recommend using a child theme. This will save you many headaches when you update to new versions of the theme, as you can safely overwrite all of the parent theme’s files without worrying about losing all of your edits.
Introduction to Child ThemesIn WordPress, a “child theme” is a theme that inherits the functionality of another theme, called the “parent theme”. It allows you to modify, or add to, the functionality of that parent theme. In our case BuddyBoss is the parent theme, and it comes pre-packaged with a starter child theme.
A child theme is the safest and easiest way to modify the BuddyBoss theme, whether you want to make a few tiny changes or extensive changes. Instead of modifying the theme files directly, you can modify them in the child theme. The child theme inherits all of the templates and functionality from the parent theme, but allows you to make changes to the parent theme without editing any of the parent theme’s code, because code in the child theme overwrites code in the parent theme.