 Hi, welcome to this lesson where we will explore the structure of WordPress themes. You will familiarize yourself with the folders and files used in a WordPress theme, describe the required and optional files needed to create a block theme, and list the standard folders used with a block theme. So let's dive in. Starting with the folders and files used in a WordPress theme. Here are the folders and files for the default WordPress theme 2024, which is a block theme. I'm going to start off by giving you a broad overview of the contents of each of these folders, and we're going to take a closer look at each of the files, including the ones listed at the bottom later in this lesson. Within the assets folder, you'll find fonts, images, CSS and JS files. Within the parts folder, you'll find HTML files for things like the header and the footer. Within patterns, you'll find PHP files for components you can build to save users time when they're building their pages and posts. Within styles, you'll find JSON files, which offer the user variations on their site's global styles. And finally within templates, you'll find HTML files for generating pages and posts. Now let's take a look at the required and optional files needed for a block theme. Here are the two necessary files, style.css and index.html. The style.css file is the main stylesheet and is required for configuring theme data, such as name and description, and it's also handy for adding custom CSS. The other required file needs to be in the templates folder and it is index.html. It is the default fallback template, and it's necessary for WordPress to consider this a block theme. Next we'll take a look at the list of optional files. The functions.php file is automatically loaded by WordPress after the theme is initialized, and this is a good place to run your custom PHP. Next we have the readme.text file, and it's not used directly by WordPress, but is a required file when you submit your theme to the official WordPress theme directory, and it also provides theme information to your users. Next we have the screenshot file, and it is recommended to use a dimension of 1200 by 900. It's an image of your theme. It's used to display your theme when people navigate within the WordPress admin. If they go to appearance themes, then they'll see the screenshot there, and it's also used within the WordPress theme directory if you choose to submit it there, and the file format can either be PNG or JPEG. The last file we'll look at is theme.json, and it is your site's configuration file for mainly settings and styles that integrate with the user interface. We'll be taking a very close look at this particular file later in the module. Now let's take a look at the standard folders used with a block theme. So here are the four folders. These are the standard ones that WordPress has designated for specific features. So we're going to take a closer look at each one of these now. Starting off with the templates folder. These are HTML files, and they represent the overall document structure of the front end, and they are essentially templates made up of block markup. We'll be taking a deeper dive into the contents of these files later in this module. Next we'll take a look at the styles folder. And you can see these are JSON files, and each one of these represents a different style variation, so users can pick the colors and fonts, just the different look and feel that they want for their website. We'll discuss these in more detail within the intermediate theme developer learning pathway. Next we'll look at patterns. So patterns are reusable components, and they're made up of one or more blocks that users can insert within the site editor. Note that WordPress will automatically register files included in this folder. Files are also covered in much more detail within the intermediate theme developer learning pathway. And the last folder is the parts folder. And these are smaller sections that can be included within top level templates. And often this will include things like headers, footers, sidebars. Now this concludes the overview of the structure of a WordPress theme.