Building Custom Themes

WordPress themes are developed in three different ways: from scratch, from a framework, or from a starter theme. Building a theme from scratch is the most difficult and time consuming, but it offers the greatest amount of control during development and provides a good learning experience. Using a framework retains a good balance of time consumption and final product quality. It also makes it easy to keep themes updated as new WordPress versions release all the time. Beginning with a starter theme is the easiest method to ensure a website is updated and still looks and feels modern. It still allows you to customize it without running into frustrating problems. Of these three, building off a framework would be my chosen path since it provides the best of both worlds: constant support and functionality while retaining deep customization.

Themes commonly include six files: index.html, style.css, screenshot.png, README.txt, theme.json, and functions.php. The html file is essential to provide the skeleton/layout of the website and for WordPress to see it as a block theme. The css file sets theme data and adds custom styles. It also adds a name and description for it. The png file shows what the theme will look like to curious developers searching for a new theme. The text file is responsible for informing developers about what the theme and what it does. The json file configures styles and settings and works with the UI. The php file is something WordPress runs when the theme needs to be enabled as a page is loading and can run custom php configurations.