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In WordPress you can quickly change the design and layout of your site by uploading a new theme and activating it in the Administration panel.

To install a new WordPress theme a few simple manual steps are needed:

1. download the theme archive;
2. unzip it;
3. upload the resulting folder into your wp-content/themes folder.

To activate an installed theme is even simpler:

1. select the Presentation subpanel in the Administration panel of your site;
2. click on the screenshot of the theme you wish to activate.

Many WordPress themes are freely available over the Internet. The official WordPress theme directory is WordPress Theme Viewer, where you can find more than one thousand themes, and you can preview and download them.

A WordPress theme is essentially a set of PHP files (template files) plus a CSS file. Each template file is a small PHP application whose task is to output the XHTML code for a specific page type (WordPress page types are the home page, the single post page, the category archive page, the monthly archive page, the author archive page, the search results page, the error page, and possibly additional custom pages).

The WordPress core provides the theme API, which allows template files to perform basic functions like accessing posts and comments, building navigation, and so on; additionally the core takes care to activate the correct template file to build the requested page type.

In conclusion the WordPress theme system allows users to quickly change their site design and layout; and, being based on PHP, doesn’t require designers to learn a special templating language while allowing them great flexibility in building custom themes.