Specialising in Wordpress Content Management Systems – Robert Fyffe

Begin creating you own custom WordPress Theme – Part 1

If you are looking to use WordPress as a fully blown Content Management System you will have to learn how to create your own custom theme. I recommend reading the article I posted called “Understanding WordPress Themes” first, as it will give you a good understanding of how themes work in WordPress.

First off I suggest setting up a new testing WordPress Installation if you all ready have a live website. This way you can experiment with your theme and it will not affect your live website. This is a pretty straightforward procedure; it is just a matter of creating a new folder in the root of your remote directory and uploading the latest version of WordPress to this folder ensuring that you have entered all your database details in the “wp-config.php” file. The name of the folder is not too important but for the purpose of this article I have gave it the name “testing”. Once you have uploaded WordPress you can complete the installation by loading it in your browser by entering the name of the new folder you created along with the location of the WordPress installation file like so:

www.yourdomain.com/testing/wp-admin/install.php

When you are working with themes you only need to be concerned with the “wp-content/themes” directory on your remote installation as this is where your themes must be uploaded. I recommend using the default theme that is in this directory as a starting point, because it all ready has all the default page templates. So to get started you will need to get your files organised locally to make it as quick and simple as possible to upload your files.

When working with FTP clients I recommended at the beginning configuring the default local and remote directories. This greatly simplifies uploading theme files, as it will by default go to the correct directories when you login. When choosing your default local directory, select the newly created “testing” folder on your computer and when selecting the remote folder choose “wp-content/themes”.

I like to organise my local folders in a specific way to make it as simple and easy as possible to edit and upload the files. See below what my local setup would be when working with the new “testing” WordPress website.

Local Site Map

As you can see above I only have the theme files locally as you never really need to touch any of the other files within WordPress.

… so far you should have:
Created a testing WordPress website on your host
Configured your FTP clients local and remote directories
Organised your local folders to suit working with WordPress

Footnotes
When we are talking about Local and Remote Directories, the difference between these two is any file that is on your local directory means that the file is on your computer and any file that is on the remote directory is on your web host or server.

If you would like any further help with what I have talked about so far leave me a comment and I will get back to you as soon as possible.