Title: How does a theme load?
Last modified: August 20, 2016

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# How does a theme load?

 *  [flypadre](https://wordpress.org/support/users/flypadre/)
 * (@flypadre)
 * [14 years, 2 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-does-a-theme-load/)
 * I’ve been working on an install for my lan and everything seems to be running
   smoothly, but I am having problems changing themes. I have my ftp daemon up and
   running and and able to download the themes and I can even see them as a choice
   in my themes menu. However, when I activate the new themes I get a msg that says
   they are active, but only get the white screen. At this point I don’t have plugins
   going so I know that is not the cause of the white screen.
 * I’ve tried several different themes and the only ones that I can get to work 
   are the default themes that came with the install.
    I’ve gone through all my 
   permissions and have set those correctly (at least I think I have). Although 
   this feels like a permissions problem. Is there a php file that changes and gets
   written to when a theme is changed? I own my wordpress file in /var/www/wordpress
   and /usr/share/wordpress all the dir are 755 and files are 644.
 * My thought is that the problem is somewhere in how wordpress loads a theme. I
   think that it just doesn’t see the file and therefore can’t load it, or doesn’t
   have the permission, but I’m not sure where this code or file might be.

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)

 *  Thread Starter [flypadre](https://wordpress.org/support/users/flypadre/)
 * (@flypadre)
 * [14 years, 2 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-does-a-theme-load/#post-2635721)
 * UPDATE
    I was able to get a different theme going by downloading it to my computer
   from wordpress.org and then cp it to my themes directory. So there seems to be
   an issue with the way things are handled when the themes are downloaded from 
   within wordpress.

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)

The topic ‘How does a theme load?’ is closed to new replies.

## Tags

 * [permissions](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/permissions/)
 * [white screen](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/white-screen/)

 * In: [Fixing WordPress](https://wordpress.org/support/forum/how-to-and-troubleshooting/)
 * 1 reply
 * 1 participant
 * Last reply from: [flypadre](https://wordpress.org/support/users/flypadre/)
 * Last activity: [14 years, 2 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-does-a-theme-load/#post-2635721)
 * Status: not resolved

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