I started using WordPress on my site a few months ago. I wanted to create a unique look, without a theme, but now I think I need my own custom theme (see reasoning below). So my question is...my site seems to be working fine with WordPress now – how do I convert it to my own theme without breaking it? The site is http://www.petiteurbanite.com (things like the about page and lightbox page are static, non-Wordpress pages).
Here are the steps I followed (this was sort of guess-and-check, which is why it seems random):
- I started with the theme “Clean Home” since it was, as you might guess from the name, very minimal.
- I then found that I could use the code
<?php define('WP_USE_THEMES', false); get_header(); ?>and bypass the theme. However, it still appears to be using the style.css file that is found in the clean-home directory, so I’ve been making changes to that (so many changes that it’s pretty much a custom style right now) as well as the original style sheet I had been using before I added WordPress. I don’t know why it does this, but the site works and I don’t know how to change it, so I only investigated it for awhile and then gave up and accepted it as it was. - I am now realizing that I would like a separate single.php page, among others, because everything is coming up in the same style as my index.php page by default (which is fine for the most part, but I just want to add or change a couple of things, like adding "previous post" and "next post" links). I decided this probably means making my own theme.
- I took the style.css file, changed the theme info at the top, dropped it into a directory with my current index.php page and put the directory (the-skyline) in the themes folder. Then I activated the theme in my WP dashboard, and I got an error when I went to the index page. (Naive, I know, to think it would be that simple, but figured it was worth a shot). No coding I changed seemed to change the outcome at all.
- Not knowing how to remove the theme altogether, I just changed the theme in my dashboard to “Clean Home” and now it is back to normal (though still behaving like it did before – not using anything from that theme but the style sheet).
I'm not a php coder, but usually I can stumble around until I figure stuff out, and this has me baffled.
