01. Introduction

Wordpress Installation 

Introduction is the first lesson of my wordpress tutorial series about creating WordPress themes. I will not teach you everything all at once. That will only confuse you. What I’ll show you is not a reference. It’s meant to teach you step-by-step, level-by-level. If you want a reference to everything WordPress themes, then read WordPress.org’s documentations, Design and Layout. Otherwise, learn from my lessons.

This lesson covers:

• Basic Rules
• Lingo / Terminology
• Hierarchy

Basic rules:

• Rule #1: Close everything in the order that you open them.
  
  In The Wrong Way to Close, the closing ul tag is out of order.
  Every tag is wrapped by the < and > characters, the presence of the forward slash, /, indicates whether each tag is an opening or closing tag. <> is open. </> is close. In the example, I used the ul (unordered list) and li (list item) tags. Notice how the opening and closing li tags sit inside the opening and closing ul tags. That’s called nesting.
• Rule #2: Every theme has at least two files – style.css and index.php. You tell your theme where everything goes within index.php and how everything should look like within style.css.
  Here is the complete list of files (don’t worry about this list yet):
  • style.css
  • index.php
  • home.php
  • single.php
  • page.php
  • archive.php
  • category.php
  • search.php
  • 404.php
  • comments.php
  • comments-popup.php
  • author.php
  • date.php

Lingo:

• Template – A set of codes that you can use in multiple places without having to write the same codes again and again.
• Template file – A file that contain one or multiple sets of codes (templates). Every page is made up of multiple template files. For example: index.php file, style.css file, sidebar.php, etc.
• Theme or WordPress theme – All the files you’re using: texts, images, codes, etc. Note: WordPress theme and WordPress template(s) are two different things, despite some people consider them the same.
• Post - Currently, you are reading a post. Furthermore, it’s simply an entry of your blog. In example, one page of a diary.
• Page – A special type of post that is not orangized by categories. It is separate from the rest of your posts. Note: In WordPress, page and Page are two different things. Whether you capitalize the “P” makes a huge difference.

Hierarchy: