28 PART I • Getting Started with WordPress
The whole point, clearly, is that the WordPress core is untouchable. Don’t mess with it unless
you really need to, and if you do, you should rethink and rethink again because chances are
there’s a better solution. Hacking the core is bad, and that’s why the wp-content–based theme
and plugin structure are so good. All that being said, you can do whatever you want with
WordPress as it is open source software. Fork it and create your own publishing platform if
you want to. For this book, I’ll assume you don’t want to do that, but rather just want to use
WordPress, which means that you won’t touch the core files. The option is there if you want it
or need it, though.THEMES AND TEMPLATE FILES
To put it simply, a theme is a skin for your blog. You can choose from many different themes
to have WordPress display your content in different designs, as shown by Figures 2-2 and 2-3,
which display the same post using two different themes.Figure 2-2: This screenshot shows a dummy post using the Twenty Fourteen theme.