Hi and welcome to this lesson on the CreateBlock Theme plugin for WordPress.
With this lesson, you will describe what the CreateBlock Theme plugin is and why you might use it,
and identify the main features of the plugin and describe their functionality.
The CreateBlock Theme plugin has been developed by the MakeWordPress.org community,
and an important aspect of this plugin before you get started is to note that it is meant for development only,
and is not intended for use on a production website.
It's rather a tool meant for creating new themes.
After you have installed and activated the CreateBlock Theme plugin, you can then navigate to Appearance > CreateBlock Theme.
Here you can find all of the different options available.
The first four here are all related to the currently activated theme.
You can either export your theme as a zipped file, you can create a child of your theme, you can clone it.
The fourth option here is to overwrite your current theme.
I'm going to describe this option in greater detail later in this lesson.
Then we have the CreateBlock Theme that's available to you in case you're wanting to start off with a boilerplate or an empty theme.
Finally, the last option here is to create a style variation.
This is something that is in relation to global styles,
and we will be covering this in much greater detail later on within the Intermediate Theme Developer Learning Pathway.
One of the best features I've discovered using the CreateBlock Theme plugin is the ability to save changes directly to my theme files.
If I were to make a change to the index template, for example, such as adding a paragraph block,
and then if I hit Save, this change is saved in the database.
If I were to now make a change within global styles, such as adding a new color, for example, to the custom palette,
so I can search for a color, or I could enter the hex code, and then I can name my color.
I'll name this one purple, and then you would hit Done.
Then if I were to hit Save, this change as well is saved to the database.
If we were to navigate now to Manage All Templates, we would see beside the index template we've got the customized notation,
and this means user customizations are taking precedence.
Now if I were to go back to the Site Editor, we see the CreateBlock Theme plugin sidebar and the Save Changes option.
This removes the changes from the database and pushes them to the theme files.
So if we were to navigate back to Manage All Templates, we will note that the customized notation has been removed.
Now we'll take a quick look in the theme files to see those saved changes.
Within the index template, we can see the paragraph block that was added.
Now let's open the Theme.json file so we can search for the new purple color.
You can see it there within Settings as a new color available for the end user to use.