WordPress: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition

Chapter 13. Editing Themes: The Key to Customizing Your Site

As you’ve traveled through this book, you’ve taken a look at every significant feature that WordPress offers and used those capabilities to build a variety of sites. However, you’ve always played by the rules, picking themes from the theme gallery, installing plug-ins from the plug-in directory, and sticking to the safety of the WordPress dashboard. But there’s a whole other world of possibilities for those who can color outside the lines.

The key to unlocking more flexibility and building a truly unique WordPress site is to create your own theme. As you know, a theme is a mash-up of HTML markup, formatting rules, and PHP code. Ordinarily, WordPress hides these details from you—the people who create the themes and plug-ins your site uses handle all this, while you focus on writing fab content and adjusting settings in the dashboard. But if you decide to cut loose and become a theme customizer (or even a theme creator), you step into a different world. Be forewarned: This world can seem dizzyingly complex. But you don’t need to understand every detail. Instead, you simply need to find the parts of a theme you want to change, and work on those.

In this chapter, you’ll start your journey by taking a close look at how themes work, and you’ll learn how to make small alterations that can have big effects. First, you’ll try modifying styles. Then, you’ll crack open a theme’s template files to change the code inside. All this is ...