I’m creating my own WordPress theme and I’ve set it up locally with MAMP. It all works fine and the theme appears when I enter localhost/wordpress in my browser. But when I enter localhost/wordpress/wp-content/themes/mysitename it is just a white blank page.
In the WordPress dashboard under themes the image next to my theme where it lets you activate it is also blank.
How can I get it to appear? Thanks in advance!
WordPress uses a frontend controller system where all site traffic passes through the index.php file in the root of the site.
Directing your browser to “localhost/wordpress/wp-content/themes/mysitename” bypasses the main controller, which means you are bypassing WordPress altogether and attempting to directly access files on the server. That directory would need to have an index.html or index.php file within it to produce some kind of output.
In order to have an image beside your custom theme in the admin, you need to create a screenshot of your theme and name it “screenshot” (can be a jpg or png) and place it in the root folder of your theme. Look inside other WP theme folders for an example of what I am talking about.