Child templates or duplicated templates

Prior to the availability of the child templates in Joomla 4, it was a common practice to duplicate a template when you needed to heavily edit it.

Duplicating a template means creating a new template, simply copying files, folders, and assets from a template. This, however, makes the duplicated template stop receiving updates.

Furthermore, duplicating a template means having all the template files twice on the filesystem: one copy for the original template and the other copy for the duplicated template. This approach makes maintenance more difficult and time-consuming, as well as increasing the risks of leaving duplicated templates without updates applied due to fear of losing all the changes made.

Child templates, instead, host just the needed files, those files that are changed from the parent template, re-using all the other files. This is a great plus for maintenance, ensuring your website is more up-to-date and secure.

With this...