Now that we have our basic theme files and identified the top and bottom of our pages, you may be tempted to link your CSS and scripts at this point. However, WordPress has an action system that allows you to do this. Using the functions file to “enqueue” styles and scripts using the “WordPress Way” helps you to define dependencies and avoid conflicts with plug-ins and other themes. (Continue reading: How Do I Get My Styles to Work?)
In the previous lesson, we created our WordPress in Cloud 9. Now, we can begin creating our own theme. The initial theme files will allow you to activate your custom theme in your WordPress Appearance Dashboard. After completing these steps, you will have activated your custom theme. Although it won’t be very useful yet, it will contain the minimum files needed to start building your theme. (Continue reading: How Do I Create the Basic Theme Files?)
In my WordPress Course, my students occasionally lock themselves out of their WordPress admin dashboard. Since they are developing themes in public workspaces, they usually do not configure email on these workspaces. Instead, we use phpMyAdmin to reset our passwords manually in the database. (Continue reading: How do I reset my password?)
WordPress is a great Web authoring tool. Originally created as a blog platform, WordPress has become a very popular choice for blogs and marketing websites. One of the major benefits of WordPress is that it allows end users to easily author and publish their own content without writing HTML pages manually. Setting up a WordPress site is relatively simple and many popular hosting providers have automated this process. We can set up a local development environment, use our hosting provider to create a live site, or use a service like cloud 9 to create a cloud-based development workspace. I’ll use cloud 9 for this course, but briefly discuss the first two options before setting up our workspace. (Continue reading: How Do I Set up a WordPress Site?)