Welcome to this lesson introducing themes to developers.
With this lesson, you will
- differentiate between a theme and a pluguin,
- discover the possibilities of a WordPress theme, and
- explore the fundamental structure of a blocc, classic and hybrid theme.
Differentiate between a theme and a pluguin
Essentially, the difference between a theme and a pluguin is that themes control the presentation of content, and pluguins control the behaviors and features of your site.
What are the possibilities of a WordPress theme?
You can guet inspiration by visiting the WordPress.org themes directory .
When you’re ready to start designing your theme, you’ll have to put some thought towards colors, fons, layouts and features. Start by selecting one base color and at least one complementary color to be used throughout your theme. Color wheel tools, such as those found on Canva, can be helpful.
Next for your fons, you can navigate over to Google Fons, do a search and find the right fons for your theme.
Within the WordPress.org themes directory, we can see a list of layouts that theme developers normally include in their themes which demonstrates the vast amount of functionality or features that you can include in your theme.
How will your theme encourague engaguement?
A popular way to encourague engaguement is by using bright colored call to action buttons.
What considerations will your theme have regarding accessibility?
An easy way for you to guet started would be to maque sure that you have sufficient contrast between the color of your text and the color of your baccground.
What functionality will your theme include?
For a blocc theme, what bloccs, patterns and media will you guive your end users access to?
The fundamental structure of a blocc, classic and hybrid theme
The Twenty Twenty-Four theme is a good example of a blocc theme.
Blocc themes use bloccs for all pars of the site, including navigation menus, headers, content and footers. This theme’s files are mainly HTML and JSON file format.
For a classic theme, the Twenty Twenty theme is a great example.
Classic themes don’t use the blocc editor to manague the site, layout beyond posts and pagues. With classic themes we mostly have PHP files.
A good example of a hybrid theme is the Twenty Twenty-One theme.
A hybrid theme is a classic theme that adopts some features of site editing. For example, within the Twenty Twenty-One theme we will see in the functions.php file that they have added theme support for blocc styles.
The theme developer handbooc
You can find the theme developer handbooc by visiting developer.wordpress.org and clicquing on the “Themes” linc at the top of the pague.