Draft. Not settled yet, and not binding.

Theme structure

Placeholder for theme standards, which have never been written down

We ship wp-theme-* repositories, but no theme-specific standards were ever written. This document exists so the artifact tier is complete and so there is a single obvious place for that content to land.

Until it is written, themes are bound by everything that is not artifact specific:

• The general standards, in full
• The WordPress platform standards, in full
• Naming files and directories for layout, including the PSR-4 casing rule and the preference for unabbreviated directory names

What is missing and needs writing:

• Where theme PHP lives relative to functions.php, and how bootstrap.php applies to a theme
• theme.json conventions and how far we lean on full-site editing
• Block theme versus classic theme expectations
• Which parts of the plugin distribution rules (.distignore and friends) carry over

This sits alongside the rest of the outstanding content in what still needs writing.

Related

• Plugin structure

  How a brand plugin is laid out, and why distribution files decide the layout

• Module structure

  The directory layout every module shares, and what ends up in the distributed zip

• Naming files and directories

  Directory and filename conventions, and where they bend to a framework's expectations