We often hear about themes in WordPress. What is a WordPress theme?
The following is by my understanding.
The first theme I used in WordPress might have been Twenty Twelve, which is the year I started with WordPress. It came with the installation. I was doing everything myself, even back then, but didn’t know, at first, that I could have used a different theme.
Especially in classic themes – which all WordPress themes were until sometime in 2021 – a theme was a uniform way the various parts of a WordPress site would present to the visitor. The theme came with preset fonts, colors, spacing, and pre-sized, pre-positioned boxes for photos. One could change these, to some extent, but generally speaking, the idea was that if you changed something in one place you’d change it pretty much everywhere.
As time went on I realized I could either customize the theme I had, or change to a different theme. I eventually did both. If I changed to a new theme, I would usually strip out some of the bells and whistles a theme might provide, since I wanted my presentation to be pretty plain. I did change the background color and a few other things.
Themes are downloadable; my impression is that there are thousands of them, both free and paid. Many have a free level, then a paid level.
Block themes came out, it seems, in around 2021. With a block theme, the user can build each entry from blocks, so it invites more variety among posts and pages. Moreover, there is less need for coding – some would say none at all.
So, in WordPress, a theme isn’t about content, but rather presentation. It’s a set of colors and fonts together with spacing conventions. One can change one’s theme spontaneously, just by downloading a new one and activating it. Or, for more granular changes, one can customize certain attributes of a classic theme. With a block theme, change is easy to make pretty much anywhere the reader will see.
This WordPress installation’s present theme is the default, Twenty Twenty-Five. It’s a block theme.
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