Hey, I was thinking this same thing. Or wondering really.
I do web design/development and never jumped into WordPress until last week and I love it! I am wanting to do my own themes and such and was wondering how people jumped into this and I looked at several themes, downloaded and they almost all have the same files.
So it seems that it is all CSS and graphics, along with the “extras” you add in and how you make an admin file for the theme.
look into ‘thesis’ for instance, or ‘lightword’, ‘arras’ or so (just to name a few) and you will see that there are some themes that are very different.
generally, you are right, on the surface there are very many themes that just differ by a few graphics, are not optimized, not validated, are difficult to modify, look different in every brower, are badly translated, and so on.
find the ‘diamond in the rough’, and take inspiration from these themes.
and yes, in the end it is all html, php, css, and graphics …
they almost all have the same files
well yeah….WP has standard file names within themes…..you don’t have to use them of course, but naming certain files certain things makes in easy to incorporate into WP
header.php
footer.php
index.php
page.php
single.php
category.php
etc…..
These are all WP standards. You can also add onto these with your own templates….or go totally off in your own direction…. Also, what each of these files do can vary pretty wildly….
So yeah, there are gonna be pretty much the same files, and a lot of the code could look the same….. as in css, html, php….they are all going to use template tags, etc…. but the functionality could be vastly different
Yeah that is what is so great about WP.
The hierarchy of the files also make everything “work” a certain way
