You’ve created an amazing theme and now you want to share it with the rest of the WordPress community. In this lesson, we’ll walk through the best practices to follow when preparing your theme for distribution.

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With the templates and CSS in place, let’s round off our theme building by adding a way for visitors to add a personal touch with their own Custom Backgrounds and Custom Headers.

I recommend adding support for these features after you’ve completed the CSS for your theme. It’s faster this way, because you can make the preview of the Custom Header and match your theme’s design. Plus, it’s easier to test the implementation of both backgrounds and headers when your design is complete. Think of them as the final flourish for your theme!

The examples in this lesson are based on the design of the Shape Sample Stylesheet from the CSS lesson.

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CSS can be tricky. It can also be incredibly easy. I had a lot of help getting my head wrapped around CSS when I was first starting out and I take great pleasure in helping others the same way I was first helped: with solid code examples to learn from.
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We’re going to round off our theme template building with the sidebar and footer templates.

Registering Sidebars

Let’s start with sidebars. In WordPress, term “sidebar” refers to the part of a theme that contains widgets.

What archive.php does (and all its related templates) is show posts based on a select criteria. A date range, or posts by a certain author, a category, or a tag. So, basically, it’s a lot like index.php.

Our theme will have one multipurpose archive.php template to cover date, category, author, and tag archives.
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The Search Template and The Page Template are vital to any complete WordPress Theme. And they’re both really easy to code.

I hate the Comments Template. There, I said it. It can be a confusing mess.

Luckily for you, I’ve sorted it out. Confusing still, yes. But sorted out. For this tutorial on the Comments Template, I’m basically going to walk you through what’s going to happen, show you some custom code snippets you’ll need to add to your inc/template-tags.php file, and then drop the whole thing on you. Hopefully, it’ll start to make sense. But at the very least you’ll have a wicked comments template.

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You’ve built an index of all your posts, now you need to create a template to frame each piece of content (or missing content) on its own. In this lesson, you’ll create templates for single posts, post attachments, and 404 error pages.

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Index.php is the most crucial WordPress Theme Template. Not only because WordPress needs to use it if you’re missing any of its brother and sister templates (like, archive.php or tag.php) but because the work we do here, getting this template right, will help us breeze through the rest of our templates (with the exception of the dreaded comments template; that’s just plain difficult no matter how you look at it).
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Now we get into the nitty-gritty: building up your header.php and validating your theme with an HTML Doctype. There’ll be a lot of PHP in this lesson, but don’t despair. We’re also going to do two essential (and kinda neat) search engine optimization techniques and add some more things to your functions.php file.
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