Activating a theme in WordPress is as simple, as hovering over the theme and

clicking activate.

An important thing to know, as a theme developer,

is what can happen that will prevent your theme from being able to be activated or,

from showing up at all in the theme section.

We had said for example, that all themes need to have a style.css file.

However, what happens if we change this to styles plural.css?

When we come back and refresh our themes, we can see that no longer is our

theme active, or, showing up at all, among the installed themes.

What we do see though, is a very helpful section that shows, broken themes.

These are themes that, as it says, are installed.

Meaning, that it has a folder in the theme hierarchy, but incomplete in some way.

This one we can see is telling us specifically,

that it's missing a style sheet.

Let's come back in and rename it again.

And we could see, that it returns to the installed list.

If we change the filename for

our index.php file, we can see that it breaks our theme,

as well as gives the explanation that a specific template is missing.

However doesn't go into a lot of detail, so

we can't use this as a testing method fully for our site.

However, it is good to know that if you have something broken with your theme and

it is installed, it may show up down here,

with some indicators of how to correct the situation.

[BLANK_AUDIO]

As a final step, let's go ahead make sure that our files are named correctly,

activate our new theme, and come to visit our site.

What we find here, is a completely blank site, which makes sense,

because our only files that we've created, have a comment, or are completely empty.

So, let's take a look over the next couple videos,

at how to begin setting up our basic template files, so

that we could have content showing, on the front end of our site