This is the third post in my ‘WordPress theme for uber n00bs‘ series. If you haven’t read my past posts in the series you will not understand what I am talking here, so go and try to learn the previous posts in the series.

This part is where you exactly need a locally installed WordPress, From this chapter we are going to create a WordPress theme step by step, So Install the WordPress in your computer for convenience. If you have installed Web Developer Server Suit, The server must be running now, go to http://localhost/wordpress/ to start running WordPress, you might need to finish the WordPress installation (Giving email, Blog name and getting a password.)

Step 1: make sure your local host is running, Open the ‘Web-Developer Controller’ from your Windows Desktop, we need Apache and MySQL running to start and work on WordPress (See the marking, in below picture)

Now the local server must be running on your PC, you can close the ‘Web Developer Suit Controller’ window now, and Navigate to the WordPress theme folder in your local disk : %drive%\www\webapps\wordpress\wp-content\themes\ - replace the %drive% with your Drive letter, C:\, D:\ etc.. where Web Developer Suit is installed.

Step 2 : Now create a folder for your theme in the WordPress themes folder, name it as tutorial for now.

Step 3 :  Now open intype or notepad and create blank style.css and index.php files in the folder tutorial. Now open index.php in intype and paste these lines to it and save it.

<?php get_header(); ?>

<?php include(TEMPLATEPATH . '/blog.php'); ?>

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>

<?php get_footer(); ?>

Now you did is, you called the header, blog-module, sidebar, and footer templates to the index.php , these are the modules we are going to create in the coming episodes. Now your tutorial theme folder must be like this

For some more expansion we can add theme information. Theme informations are added in the first lines of style.css file as some comments. WordPress can read the theme details from it.

/*
Theme Name: FeatherPot Tutorial
Theme URI: the-theme's-homepage
Description: A basic theme created with the help of a FeatherPot Tutorial
Author: FeatherPot Reader
Author URI: http://featherpot.com
Version: 1.0
.
General comments/License Statement if any.
To create your own WordPress theme follow the tutorial in FeatherPot. This is a Free theme released under GPL terms
.
*/

Now you can activate the theme we are creating, login to the the WordPress dashboard of local installation by http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/, and navigate to Design > Themes > and activate the ‘FeatherPot Tutorial‘ theme by clicking on the name. you can see the theme details we have just added into the style.css working here. Take a look at the theme we just made, how is that ? :D OK, don’t get nervous, you are seeing some errors because WordPress can’t find some template files we said to include to the index.php only you and me know that we didn’t created those templates, and we will create them in the coming episodes.

Hope you have understood todays class, keep in mind that a WordPress theme must have a style.css and index.php to work, else you will not be able to find the theme in the Design selection area of WordPress dash board. That means a WordPress theme will not work if there are many files except index.php and style.css

Stay tuned without destroying the work we have done. If you have any doubts kindly add it as a comment, emails / IMs won’t get a reply anymore !