New to WordPress – How do you create your own theme

  • After a lot of CMS research I’ve chosen to use WordPress. I’m a professional Web Developer and I already have a community site up that I want to hand over to the community to update. They have no coding experience so I want to give them access to a simple CMS tool.

    I’ve successfully installed wp on my server and read a lot of the documentation but I can’t find one document that tells me how to create my own theme and template. Your Help section is very clear but it has so many branches in so many directions that it’s difficult to find an A-Z description of what I need to do. I saw a reference to a video in one of the recent posts but haven’t come across it. Like most CMS sites, most of the info is on choosing a theme that is already built.

    As a test I created a header.php, index.php and footer.php in the wp-content/themes/myown/ folder and it shows up in the cpanel of wp but gives an include error (line 2 of index.php which has no include).

    Specifically, which wp files do I need to edit and where? What db fields do I need to create in order to migrate my content (which is now in static HTML pages) and how do I connect the template to the db?

    What’s throwing me off a bit as well is the constant reference to wp as a “blog” when clearly blogging is only one component of the entire website that it builds.

    Thanks
    Charles

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

  • Theme development on the Codex:
    https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Theme_Development

    An old tutorial but still probably one of the best:
    https://www.wpdesigner.com/2007/02/19/so-you-want-to-create-wordpress-themes-huh

    Thread Starter charles_i

    (@charles_i)

    Thanks! I’ll check them out.

    Thread Starter charles_i

    (@charles_i)

    I’m still trying to get to the bottom of how to create a “theme”. I see that in order to connect to the CMS you need to link to it using something like <?php the_content(); ?> but where are these functions?

    Is it possible to use WordPress as a website CMS tool? That’s what I want. It appears to be a “blog” – yet the WordPress website indicates that it is powered by WordPress and the website is not a blog.

    In order to make each section (ie tab like home, showcase, etc.) of a website available to update via the CMS tool do you need to create a theme for each one?

    Is there a section of instructions on how to do this? I can only find references to the types of pages needed (header.php, index.php style.css, footer.php) – not how to actually edit and use them.

    Thanks
    Charles

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • The topic ‘New to WordPress – How do you create your own theme’ is closed to new replies.