 If you're new to theme development like me, you might find it hard to picture the steps it takes to go from no theme at all to your very first blank custom block theme. The WordPress developer handbook explains it well, but what does this look like in action? This brief tutorial is meant to help demystify what essential files you need and how to set them up to go from zero theme to a brand new totally blank block theme. As you'll discover, it's easier to get the very basic setup than you might expect. By the end of this video, you will be able to create your first basic empty block theme of your very own and briefly explain what each necessary file does. To get started, you will need a few things. One, a local development environment such as local, shamp, or mail, and two, a text editor such as Visual Studio Code, Sublime, or PHPStorm. Finally, you'll need to set up a sample WordPress website to experiment with and create your files. Once you have these things, you're ready to go. Let me walk you through it. I will be using local by flywheel today and Visual Studio Code. First, I will make my sample WordPress website. This gives me a place to experiment. Once that's set up, I will navigate into the local files where WordPress themes live. Please note that it can be a little tricky to find local's WordPress files the first time, so I made a shortcut to them here for my own computer. Be aware that you may need to do some digging in your computer to find your development environment's WordPress files. Now, I'm going to open up my text editor. Once I've found my sample website's WordPress files, I will navigate to its themes folder. I click the name of my sample site and click App, then Public, then I scroll down to wp-content. From there, I select Themes and I'm there. Here, I will create a new folder where my brand new themes files will live. I'm going to call this new block theme my Dream Theme, so that is what I will name this folder. Now, I'm going to open this brand new theme folder. You will see that it's empty inside. It's time to create its first files. I will start creating my new block theme with the first of the three files, index.php. I don't need to write very much here. All you'll see me type is left-carat-php, no other coding at all. This file was once an all-important file for classic themes, but now exists largely as a safety feature to prevent hackers from being able to see a full list of your themes in our files. In the future, this file may no longer be needed at all, but as of August 2022, it's necessary for block themes to function securely. Before you'll find your theme in your WordPress dashboard, you need a second file, style.css. This file's purpose is to tell WordPress itself, hi WordPress, I exist. I'll include some code here, slash star on the first line, and on the second line, I'll type theme name colon, my dream theme. The third line, I'll write author colon, Sarah Snow. And on the last line, I'll write star slash to finish it up. This file alerts WordPress that my theme exists and WordPress responds by showing my theme in my WordPress dashboard. Congratulations, your theme exists and can even be activated. If you click around, you're going to find that your custom theme might exist, but it doesn't do much of anything. Yet, where's the block editor? How does this newborn theme grow into an actual full block theme? We need one more directory and one more file to make it happen. First, this new file needs a folder to live in. We will name this new folder templates with an S at the end. Use your text editor to create this new folder. Once that folder is created, create a new file, index.html. Make sure this index.html file is inside the templates folder or it won't work. You don't even need to add code to this file to watch your theme transform into a beautiful new block theme. Watch as I reload my dashboard. Suddenly, I can use the site editor. Congratulations, you now have a blank canvas upon which you can design a new block theme. Take a look at how the template folder you just made and the empty index.html file you created show up in the site editor. Cool, right? Please note that this is just the first step in creating a custom block theme. There's still quite a bit more to learn. For example, if you make changes in the site editor, you have to export your theme in order for these changes to be written into these files that you just created. There's also a world of new possibilities with theme.json code. Visit learn.wordpress.org in the future for new tutorials and courses to discover the next steps to build a custom block theme of your very own. Of course, you can always head to the theme handbook at developer.wordpress.org slash themes. We'll see you next time.