Suggestions for a Genesis multi-site implementation?

[nickpish]

I'm hoping to get some suggestions for how best to configure a multi-site setup using Genesis: basically, we've created a custom child theme w/ Genesis as the parent, and we'd like to use this child theme as the baseline for a number of websites in a multi-site network. All of these sites would use the same, core functionality via plugins, etc. However, the *presentational* aspect of the sites would differ- i.e. layouts, type, colors, images, etc. I realize we could use the WP Customizer to enter custom CSS for each site, but I'm wondering if there's a more robust method of editing styles for each sub-site- ideally, each site would have its own CSS file to override the defaults of the child theme. Essentially, if we could implement a "grandchild" theme for each site, that would be ideal, with the custom Genesis theme as the parent, and Genesis itself as the "grandparent", but it doesn't seem like such a configuration is possible?

I'm curious if anyone out there has tried something similar using Genesis, and what approach you may have taken? Perhaps a plugin or functions edit to apply/add a custom stylesheet for each sub-site? Thanks for any insight here!

[Victor Font]

WordPress does not allow grandchild themes. That idea is not possible.

Multisite shares resources across all sites setup in that environment. This means there is only one set of plugins, themes, etc. across all sites. The only things each site has on their own is content and images.

While the Genesis Framework can be shared across all sites, each site needs to have its own child theme, in theory at least. If you share the one child theme across all sites, any change you make to it will be applied to all sites. This is just the way WordPress works.

To accomplish what you want to do, you have to split the customizations out of the child theme if they apply to only one site. If a customization can apply to all sites, leave it in the child theme. If the customizations apply to one site, either use the WordPress customizer (easiest), a plugin for code snippets, or create separate style sheets for each site and load them conditionally based on the site that's being accessed.

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Regards,

Victor
https://victorfont.com/
Call us toll free: 844-VIC-FONT (842-3668)
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[nickpish]

Thanks for your response, Victor. I figured a "grandchild" configuration wasn't possible, but wanted to check. I think for our purposes, loading stylesheets conditionally based on the blog ID is probably what makes the most sense. These sites will be extremely similar in functionality, and only differ on the presentation layer- thus, we'd like to use a single child theme with core templates, and layer on style changes for each site over the defaults (while still using the Genesis framework.)

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