Code a Theme

Many people have asked me how to customize wordpress. This tutorial teach how to change the templates and such.
YOU SHOULD HAVE WORDPRESS INSTALLED ALREADY. IF NOT, click here to learn how to install wordpress
Also you must already know how to code your layout.

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If you want to edit a current folder please skip this step.
First make a new folder under ‘wp-content/themes’. Now copy all the files from the ‘default’ folder and paste them into the new folder. To do this just right click -> download -> select folder and choose a folder for these files to go in. Then upload them to the new folder.

Now open ‘header.php’. The necessary changes you have to make are:

Between ‘< title >‘ and ‘< / title >‘ You should change it to your title. You can always keep it though.

Delete the coding AFTER ‘< body >‘ and add your own header code.

Open ‘footer.php’. You may delete all that and just add your own footer coding.

Ok, now open ‘index.php’. Here is where you edit the templete when visitors first visit your site.

First delete the ‘< div id=" content " class=" narrowcolumn " >‘ and change it to your own coding. How do you start your page? Mine would be ‘< div class=" main " >‘

Secondly, find ‘< div < ?php post_class() ? > id=”post-< ?php the_ID(); ? >” >’ and underneath that you should see ‘< h2 >‘ and something about permalink. That is the title of your post. So edit ‘h2′ bit to your own title code.
IF YOU DON’T WANT YOUR TITLE TO BE A LINK delete everything between your header code and add this ‘< ?php the_title(); ? >‘ without the spaces so it should be ” and the beginning and end of the code.

Thirdly, underneath you should see ‘< small >‘ and the word ‘time’ somewhere in that line. That is the code for where you want the time to be posted. and then you see the word ‘author’. That obviously is the author code. Then you should see something about ‘entry’. That is obviously your blog post. Later on you should see the word ‘tags’, ‘category’ & ‘comments’. I’m pretty sure you can guess what that means! So just edit and customise it anyway you want it.

Underneath all that you should see something like ‘previous entries’ and ‘next entries’. They are obviously the links to previous entries and next entries.

Now that you have edited your index page, I suggest you remember how you customise it. Because now, you have to edit archive.php and single.php in the similar manner. Archive.php is the page for when people click on category or days on your calendar (if installed). You know when you click on ‘comment’ you see the blog post AGAIN and then the comment form? Well ‘single.php’ represents that blog post.

Now open ‘comments.php’ . The coding looks pretty straight forward. The first part you cannot edit. Then underneath ‘you can start editing here’ is the layout of the way the comments are posted. Change it anyway you want.
For some reason, in the defaults folder, the comments.php doesn’t show the author and the link of the comment. So I suggest you to go to the ‘classic’ folder and copy from here:


And replace this:

Now just edit that bit of code you just pasted and customise it. Should be pretty straight forward.

Now the last page that is necessary to edit is the style.css
DON’T JUST ADD YOUR OWN STYLESHEET IN. That will NOT work. You have to replace bit by bit. For example, at the beginning, you see ‘BODY’. Replace it with YOUR own body code. Know what I mean? However there are some codes you should not delete :

Everything that begins with ‘comment’ or has ‘comment’ in it.

Things that have ‘calendar’ in it.

Blockquote & HR

& finally anything that have ‘caption’ in it.

So this brings the end of the wordpress tutorial and I hope that you could follow on this long tutorial.