How to Set up and Activate a WordPress Topic

[This tutorial applies to WordPress blogs working in a self-hosted setting, which means that you’ve mounted WordPress on a web host of your possess. It does not implement to blogs hosted on totally free WordPress.com accounts.]

Setting up a WordPress theme is very easy. WordPress themes obtainable for obtain from different places on the World wide web are usually packaged in .zip files (i.e. concept-name.zip). Setting up a WordPress concept includes absolutely nothing more than unzipping the .zip file into the appropriate listing of your WordPress installation, and activating the concept from your WordPress administration console.

Construction of a WordPress Theme

In purchase for you to install your new WordPress concept appropriately, you need to have to understand the essentials of how the WordPress program interacts with themes. A WordPress theme wants three essential data files in order to operate properly with the WordPress administration:

o An index.php file: This file is the controller of a WordPress weblog. Most WordPress themes also have other PHP files that depict a variety of sections of a WordPress page, but index.php is the only truly needed PHP file.

o A fashion.css file: This file controls the search and format of the WordPress-primarily based internet site utilizing fashion definitions. It also is made up of the data that is utilized in the Handle Themes part of WordPress to show the theme name, model, creator, and description

o A “screenshot” picture: This image is utilized to generate preview of the corresponding topic in the Control Themes segment of the WordPress administration. It can be any of the widespread net graphics data files (png, jpg, gif), but it wants to be named screenshot. For occasion, screenshot.png, screenshot.jpg, or screenshot.gif.

If you’ve got gotten your topic from a designer who understands what he’s carrying out, you will not actually want to be concerned about creating positive the theme is established up accurately. If you’re not positive, you may just want to double-examine that you’ve got the standard files essential to put in your concept.

WordPress Directory Construction

The WordPress listing construction consists of a few folders in the root listing:

o wp-admin
o wp-content
o wp-contains

Below the wp-articles folder there is a folder called themes. Inside this folder is exactly where you want to deposit the folder that includes your topic. Here’s an example. Say GPL Site review am setting up a topic for a recipe website. The concept is named Recipe, and its folder framework looks like this:

recipe-blog/
index.php
type.css
screenshot.png

This topic would usually be packaged in a .zip file. To use the topic, I would require to unpackage the file, then upload it (probably using FTP) into my WordPress themes folder. If I have WordPress mounted on my world wide web server under a listing named weblog, my listing construction would search like this:

/WordPress/wp-material/themes/recipe-blog/

index.php

style.css

screenshot.png

Activating a WordPress Topic

Soon after I add the concept to the right directory, I can now go to my WordPress administration to activate it. Following logging in to the WordPress admin part, I go to Appearances->Themes. I can see that my new theme is installed correctly and all set to be activated, due to the fact I can see it in under Available Themes on the Handle Themes website page.