During the development of WordPress 3.0 we have made a number of changes under the hood which will be of interest to the developers and users of themes.  Some of these changes are about making themes easier to develop and some of them are about making it easier to support the override of parts of themes. 1) get_template_part – [13146] , #12371 The first change which should make it easier for extensible flexible theme development is the introduction of get_template_part() which has been introduced as a generic way of modularising themes a step beyond the basic footer/body/header files.  This new function makes it very easy for a theme to reuse blocks of code implementing theme areas such as the WordPress loop in a way which makes it easy for a child theme to override the implementation in a context sensitive way. This function is really easy to use – You create a file within your theme containing the code you want to re-use and then you pull it in as follows: get_template_part( ‘loop’, ‘author’ ); // Pull in the loop for the author archives This will look for the files loop-author.php and loop.php searching first in the current themes folder before looking in the parent themes folder (if one if defined).  The new TwentyTen theme in WordPress 3.0 uses this for every call to it’s loop.php to make it easy to override in a single instance from a child theme.