WordPress 4.7 “Vaughan” comes with a handful of helper functions and filters making theme developers to code child theme file inheritance easily.

The following are enhanced forms of get_stylesheet_directory_uri, get_stylesheet_directory and it’s parent parts get_template_directory , get_template_directory_uri.

• get_theme_file_uri()
• get_parent_theme_file_uri()
• get_theme_file_path()
• get_parent_theme_file_path()

We will explore why these functions are introduced, what they do and where to use them?

When theming, to enqueue scripts or styles we used to do something like this.

In a child theme

wp_enqueue_script('my-theme-script-slug',
get_stylesheet_directory_uri().'/js/my-script.js',array(), '1.0', true );

In a parent theme

wp_enqueue_script('my-parent-theme-script-slug',
get_template_directory_uri().'/js/my-script.js',array(), '1.0', true );

Using get_stylesheet_directory_uri() we get the child theme’s root directory uri (/wp-content/themes/child-theme) and using get_template_directory_uri() we get parent theme’s root directory uri(/wp-content/themes/parent-theme).

But this type of enqueue has an issue when it comes to child theme inheritance and that is we just can’t place a script/style file in the child theme with the same name as that of parent theme that automatically override parent theme’s file. That means, if a parent theme is enqueuing script.js and if we want to override that file in the child theme, we have to dequeue original file and need to enqueue child version of script.js which is a little more work to do.

// First dequeue script that comes with parent theme with correct handle
wp_dequeue_script('parent-script');
 
// Next enqueue child theme version of it
wp_enqueue_script('child-script');

Now with WP 4.7, there is no need to dequeue and then enqueue just to override a script that is in the parent, we can use get_theme_file_uri while enqueuing like so.

wp_enqueue_script('handle',get_theme_file_uri( '/sc.js' ),array(), '1.0');

get_theme_file_uri first looks for the file in the child theme, if it exists then it returns get_stylesheet_directory_uri, else it returns get_template_directory_uri. If we don’t pass any file parameter to the function, it returns current theme stylesheet directory url.

get_parent_theme_file_uri directly returns url of parent theme directory if no file is given and the url to the file in parent theme if it is given.

get_theme_file_path and get_parent_theme_file_path returns path to the files on the server like /var/www/website.com/wp-content/themes/mytheme.

If we want to use the same functionality for WP versions < 4.7, we can place the following snippet(taken from core itself).

if(!function_exists('get_theme_file_uri')){
  function get_theme_file_uri( $file = '' ) {
    $file = ltrim( $file, '/' );
 
    if ( empty( $file ) ) {
        $url = get_stylesheet_directory_uri();
    } elseif ( file_exists( get_stylesheet_directory() . '/' . $file ) ) {
        $url = get_stylesheet_directory_uri() . '/' . $file;
    } else {
        $url = get_template_directory_uri() . '/' . $file;
    }
 
    return apply_filters( 'theme_file_uri', $url, $file );
  }
}

It is recommended that we use these functions for great file inheritance inclusion.