Customising The Default WordPress Theme: 2

Protecting Your Customisations

If you have customised the WordPress default theme, all of your changes will be over-written the next time you upgrade WordPress. So you need to protect them now by creating your own custom theme.

1. Using FTP (or whatever file management tool you have available), download the wp-content/themes/default folder to your machine.
2. Rename the downloaded folder “mytheme”.
3. Using a plain text editor, open style.css in this new folder and, at the very top of the file change:

   Theme Name: WordPress Default
   Theme URI: http://wordpress.org/

   to

   Theme Name: My Theme

4. Upload the mytheme folder to wp-content/themes on your server.
5. In WordPress, navigate to Appearance / Themes and you should see that the My Theme is now available as a separate theme. Activate it.

Your customisations are now protected against over-writing during an automatic upgrade.