WordPress is dominating the world of online blogging and website creation. Even those with minimal computer skills can use the platform  to create a professional website in under a few hours. WordPress offers hundreds (maybe even thousands) of plug-and-play themes and plugins for download, customization, and implementation, and its open-source policy allows for web developers to create and use their own as well.

Developing custom themes for WordPress can seem overwhelming and confusing to anyone trying to dive in. While there are many great beginner tutorials out there, most of them do not provide good example code, and if they do, it is often poorly formatted and hard to manipulate. Even those that do provide good samples tend to only teach you how to float, but never how to actually swim. Readers are left confused and struggling, unsure of how to take the leap from a bare-bones template with little styling and applicability to a template worth using.

In hopes of helping those who already know how to float, but are struggling to swim, I have created the WordPress Theme Template. This template should be used again and again as the starting point for any new theme.

How to get started…

• Download the source code here
• Search and replace all instances of “zzzYourThemeNameHere” with the name of your theme.
• Edit the html and css code of your theme as desired. Ideally, the only files you should have to touch for this step are:
  • style.css
  • index.php
  • 404.php
  • header.php
  • footer.php
  • All files in template-parts/
• Upload the theme to your WordPress website and activate it.

As time goes on, I will try to add a better tutorial and explanation of all the parts to this page here and to the README.md file.