WordPress Theme – Tips to Activate your Blog Theme

This tutorial is intended to enlighten users of WordPress blogs processed in a self-hosted environment, this means that you’ve installed WordPress on a web host by our own means. This doesn’t apply to blogs hosted on WordPress.com accounts of no charge.

Its can be very straight forward when one is at the installation of a WordPress theme and the theme that are usually available for download on the web are usually packed in .zip file format. Although it’s not much of a hard task actually, all you need to do is to unzip the files and extract them in the WordPress installed directory, then simply activate it through your WordPress administration console.

A WordPress Theme’s Structure

In order to correctly install your new WordPress theme, you have to know the basics and have an understanding how the whole system interacts with the themes. Basically, your theme requires essential files in order to work properly with the WordPress administration:

-          An Index.php file: This file basically controls the WordPress blog. Some WordPress themes have other PHP that can represent the varying sections of a WordPress page. But index.php is the probably your most crucial PHP file.

-          A style.css file: using different style definitions, this file control the over all layout of your blog. It also contains information related to the Manage Themes section of the WordPress display.

-          A “screenshot” image: This image functions in creating a preview of the corresponding theme in the Manage Themes section of the WordPress administration. This can be of any graphic file format, but requires to be named as “screenshot”.

For those of you who were lucky enough to get their themes from a designer who actually knows what he’s doing, you won’t have to worry about making sure that the theme’s installation goes smoothly. But if you’re not sure, you’re free to double check it if you want to. Just simply look for the basic files needed to get you theme working in good shape.

WordPress Directory Structure

The WordPress directory structure has three essential folders in its root directory and these are:

-          wp-admin

-          wp-content

-          wp-includes

In the wp-content folder, you can find a folder called themes. Hthis is the folder where you’ll need to deposit the folder that contains your theme.

Inside this folder is where you need to deposit the folder that contains your theme. Here’s an example. Let’s assume I’m installing a theme for a computer blog. The theme is then called “computer”, and its folder structure looks like this:

computer-blog/
index.php
style.css
screenshot.png

This theme would naturally be in a .zip file format. To use the theme, to use the file, you’ll need to unzip it first, and then upload it (probably using FTP) into a WordPress themes folder. If you have WordPress installed on your web server under a directory called blog, your directory structure would probably appear like this:

/WordPress/wp-content/themes/computer-blog/

index.php

style.css

screenshot.png

Activating a WordPress Theme

After uploading the correct theme to the appropriate directory, you can now go to your WordPress administration in order to activate it. After logging in to the WordPress’s administration section, go to the Appearances, then themes. You’ll see that your new theme is installed properly and ready to be activated. You’ll know that it’s ready when you see it on Available themes on the Manage Themes page.

At this point, you’re just a click away to activate your theme; all you need to do is to click on the Activate link associated with the new theme. After which, your theme will now be active on your new WordPress blog.