Tutorial Blog

What is a Theme?

Fundamentally, the WordPress Theme system is a way to “skin” your weblog. Yet, it is more than just a “skin.” Skinning your site implies that only the design is changed. WordPress Themes can provide much more control over the look and presentation of the material on your website.

A WordPress Theme is a collection of files that work together to produce a graphical interface with an underlying unifying design for a weblog. These files are called template files. A theme modifies the way the site is displayed, without modifying the underlying software. Themes may include customized template files, image files (*.jpg, *.gif), style sheets (*.css), custom Pages, as well as any necessary code files (*.php). For an introduction to template files, see Stepping Into Templates.

Themes are a whole new ball game. Let’s say you write a lot about cheese and gadgets. Through the innovative use of the WordPress Loop and template files, you can customize your Cheese category posts to look different from your Gadgets category posts. With this powerful control over what different pages and categories look like on your site, you are limited only by your imagination. For information on how to use different Themes for different categories or posts, see The Loop in Action and Category Templates.

Using Themes

WordPress supplies two themes in its distribution for your initial use. You can switch between these two themes using the admin panel. Themes that you add to that directory will appear in the Administration Panels > Appearance > Themes as additional selections.

You can read the instructions in article “How Change Your Themes WordPress” to understand more

Creating Themes

If you are interested in creating your own theme for distribution, or learning more about the architecture of themes, please review the documentation regarding Development Themes and Designing Themes for Public_Release.

Theme Files

The following are the files typically included within a Theme.

From: WordPress