Creating a custom Wordpress theme is damn easy. So easy in fact that when I was originally researching how to do this I didn’t find anything out there that relayed exactly how easy it is. You can find detailed instructions at the official Wordpress documentation, but if you are an experienced web developer and php coder this will give everything you need to immediately hit the ground running.
Assuming you have a working version of Wordpress:
1. Go into your ‘/wp-content/themes/’ folder
2. Copy the ‘classic’ folder and rename it to something that will represent your site (use underscores to separate words and stick with alphabetic characters only – see comment from Ron Fredericks below)
3. In the new folder you just created open the file called ’style.css’
4. In the top of that css file edit the sections within the /* commented out area */. Update ‘Theme Name’, ‘Theme URI’, ‘Description’, ‘Version’, ‘Author’, and ‘tags’ appropriately with your new themes information. (If you can’t think of everything right now don’t worry you can always come back later and change it.)
Theme Name: My Theme
Theme URI: http://www.londonstreetlife.com/
Description: My custom theme.
Version: 1.0
Author: Richard Perry
Author URI: http://blog.londonstreetlife.com/
Tags: Simple gray, two column
*/
5. Create a 300×225 pixels png image with a screenshot of your site, name it “screenshot.png” and overwrite the current one in your theme folder. If you don’t have the design done yet then create an FPO image for the time being, or you can use the one I already made below:
6. Now the fun part. Log into your Wordpress admin section and click Appearance->Themes in the side menu. Now you’re in the themes admin section and you should see the theme you’ve just created under the ‘Available Themes’
7. Clicking either the thumbnail or theme title of your theme will bring up a screen with a demo of your new themes homepage (obviously you haven’t changed anything yet so it will still look life the classic theme.)
8. Hit the ‘Activate’ link top right to set this as your wordpress theme.
That’s it, you’ve just created your own theme! Now you can start making changes to the ’style.css’ file to make it your own.
This is part of an ongoing series of posts I am publishing talking about how to use Wordpress as a custom CMS.
Thanks, I feel comfortable enought to take the steps you outline above. A good start in creating a new look and feel for my site.
After following the instuctions here – I would add one warning: don't create a stupid directory name for your theme. A stupid name would be a directory name with spaces in it like "My Theme". Use a name without spaces and probable wise to stay with lower case letters too. Like this "my_theme".
If your directory name is in fact stupid – then your blog won't display anything at all. I call it "stupid" because unix sites don't like spaces and are case sensitive.
I hope this helps.
Good point Ron. Whilst it’s good practice to not use spaces in file and folder names, in this case it appears to be a requirement. Thanks!
Hi, Thank you! I would now go on this blog every day!