Why is style.css breaking my custom Wordpress theme?

I have a clean install of WP 3.0.1, installed through cPanel and have created a directory for my new theme at /wp-content/themes/mytheme.

With an empty directory, the theme does not appear in the theme manager of the W开发者_StackOverflowP backend (as expected). If I add any PHP files (e.g. "page.php"), a warning appears in the theme manager that "mytheme" is broken because there is no style.css (again, as expected). But when I add style.css to the directory, the warning disappears and my theme is nowhere to be found in the theme manager. What's going on here?

Inside your style.css file you have to make sure that you are calling the default settings which wordpress will pick up, if you open up the default theme 'twentyten/style.css'

you will see this at the top..

/*
Theme Name: Twenty Ten
Theme URI: http://wordpress.org/
Description: The 2010 theme for WordPress is stylish, bla bla bla
Author: the WordPress team
Version: 1.1
Tags: black, blue, white, two-columns, fixed-width, etc..etc..etc..
*/

this has all the information wordpress needs inorder to include that theme in your appearence section.

once you have this inside your 'Mytheme' folder it will show up in the theme section, if you create a small png file called 'screenshot.png' add this inside your MyTheme folder, this will show up as the thumbnail for that theme... again look inside the twentyten folder and see how the files are arranged, this will give you a better understanding of how wordpress themes are built...

best thing to do while creating a new theme from scratch is possibly creating a copy of the twentyten folder and edit out all the un-required elements..

that gives you a good building block to work against.

or if you want there are a few themes out their which are naked themes, meaning they have the bearbones of what a theme needs then you can built upon..