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WordPress The WordPress Template Hierarchy How WordPress Templates Work Walkthrough of Example Site

Ryan Johnson
Ryan Johnson
269 Points

Hi, I am not able to install this theme due to missing the style.css stylesheet. It's in the download...

Hi, I am not able to install this theme due to missing the style.css stylesheet. I get the following error:

Installing Theme from uploaded file: wp-template-hierarchy.zip Unpacking the package…

Installing the theme…

The package could not be installed. The theme is missing the style.css stylesheet.

Theme install failed

7 Answers

it should have just worked with zipped file from the dashboard, instead of manually copying the un-zipped version. Hence all these comments.

you should contain style.css in the theme folder not to subfolders.

Hi Ryan,

You can not install a wordpress theme nor activate it without containing a "style.css" file containing meta information about the theme. You can take a look at this; http://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development under "2.2 Theme Stylesheet".

Hope this helps, good luck!

I'd like to just say, to be specific for anyone having a problem with this, that the project download contains the template files in a subfolder. You can't install from the admin area directly because wordpress will look in that home directory for the style.css. Just grab the "template-hierarchy" out of the zipped "wp-template-hierarchy" folder and you're golden.

Shaun Vine
Shaun Vine
5,184 Points

Thanks Timothy, works perfectly.

I had this same issue but the solutions above did not seem to work for me. I unzipped the folder opened it and zipped the folder named template-hierarcy and uploaded that file. That worked for me. I hope this helps.

Samantha Bretous
Samantha Bretous
1,803 Points

There is one extra level of directories when you are installing the theme. If you are installing the zip directly from the project downloads it will not work. WordPress is looking for just style.css but you are installing it wp_template_hierarchy/style.css so it is having trouble finding it. You need to open the zip and re-zip just the template-hierarchy folder. After that WordPress will give you the thumbs up. Happy Coding!!!