Now that you have your styles and scripts working, let’s register support for navigation menus. If you’ve used WordPress with built-in or third party themes, you’re probably familiar with creating menus in your site’s dashboard. When we create our theme from scratch, we have to register our menus using actions and identify the placement for each menu. (Continue reading: How do I Add Navigation Menus?)

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?)