Welcome to the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Today we’re looking at Theme Development.

Let’s start with the basics. A WordPress theme controls how your website looks and behaves visually. It pulls together template files, stylesheets, and PHP functions to create the overall design experience. For NZRT, the theme in use is called RetroTube, and it’s been built with a video-focused design in mind.

To understand how a theme works, it helps to know what’s inside one. The wiki shows us a typical theme folder layout, and here’s what you’d find. At the top level there are several key files. The first is the main stylesheet — this is required for every WordPress theme because it contains a special header comment that tells WordPress the theme’s name and version details. Next is the functions file, which is the engine room of the theme — more on that in a moment. Then there’s a fallback template file that WordPress uses when it can’t find anything more specific. After that you have separate files for the site header and footer, a sidebar region file, and then a handful of more targeted templates: one for individual blog posts, one for static pages, one for category and date archive listings, and one for search results. Finally there’s an assets folder that holds your images, JavaScript, and any additional CSS files.

That structure gives you a clean separation of concerns. Each file has a job, and WordPress knows exactly which one to call depending on what the visitor is looking at.

Which brings us to something called the Template Hierarchy. This is the logic WordPress uses to decide which template file to load, and you can think of it as a priority list with three levels. WordPress always looks for the most specific file first. So if someone is viewing a custom post type called video, WordPress will look for a file dedicated to that post type before it falls back to the more general single post template. If it can’t find a specific match, it steps down to the general template. And if it still can’t find that, it uses the fallback index file as the final safety net. This hierarchy gives you a lot of flexibility — you can target very specific content types with custom layouts without touching anything else in the theme.

Now let’s talk about that functions file, because it does a lot of heavy lifting. This is where you tell WordPress what features your theme supports — things like featured images or custom navigation menus. It’s also where you register and load your stylesheets and JavaScript files, making sure everything is queued up properly rather than just dropped in manually. Beyond that, the functions file is where you add hooks and filters, which are WordPress’s way of letting you tap into the system at specific points to modify or extend behaviour. You can also define custom post types and taxonomies here if your content structure needs them.

For NZRT specifically, the RetroTube theme has been customised to support a video-heavy, module-based content structure. NZRT brand colours are built into the theme, and there’s support for virtual agent customisations — so the theme isn’t just handling aesthetics, it’s actively shaping how NZRT’s tools and content are presented to visitors.

One integration worth knowing about is SmartSlider 3 Pro. This is a slider plugin that works directly with the RetroTube theme templates to power the hero sliders — those large, full-width banner areas you typically see at the top of pages. Because it integrates at the template level rather than just being dropped in via a shortcode, you get much finer control over how those sliders look and behave across different page types.

So to bring it all together: a WordPress theme like RetroTube is a structured collection of files, each with a specific role. The folder layout keeps things organised, the template hierarchy gives WordPress a clear decision path for every page type you visit, and the functions file ties everything together with theme support declarations, asset loading, and custom logic. For NZRT, all of that is tuned to support a media-rich experience with brand consistency and tight plugin integration built in from the ground up.

That’s it for this episode of the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Thanks for listening.