WordPress Manual Install Theme/Display Issue

0
votes

My Problem

I manually installed WordPress on a Debian 9 VM in Virtual Box on a Windows 10 machine. When I pull up the website, this is what I get: A WordPress site with just HTML, no formatting

The point of this install was to learn how to make a custom WordPress theme. I have built child themes before, but never a theme from scratch, so it may be I don't have everything set up yet. But there is a second issue is WordPress does not give me an option to select my second theme either.

What I did

To set up the site, I followed this tutorial on setting up WP on a Debian system. I sort of touched up on this, but I am new to WP development. I thought this was a quick and dirty route to set up a WP install. I don't have the knowledge of WordPress to know if there is an error in this setup guide.

Again, I checked the themes folder. I could not find the custom theme I started to build as an option. I can't currently download themes straight from WP because I don't have an FTP server/client currently installed on my machine. If it were just the inability to choose a WordPress theme from the WordPress theme repository, I'd suspect it's the FTP setup. But, I also can't choose my custom theme. So is there something wrong with the install?

Summary

I can't get any formatting to work on my WP development site. I suspect it's some problem with themes, but I don't know enough about the internals WordPress to know how to diagnose the problem.

Thank you for your time

1
phpwordpressformattingwordpress-theming

1 Answers

0
votes

It's tough to say without seeing your setup exactly, but this is often caused by URL problems.

Are you able to access wp-admin? If so, try logging in and visiting the settings > permalinks page, then just hitting the save button.

Try reloading your site. It might be fixed.. If not, a little more to try. First, I'd open your browser's Console / Inspect mode, and see if there are any console errors (showing CSS files not loading, etc). If so, post them here.

Additionally, I found a helpful article that details some other things to try when this problem pops up:

http://wphelp24.com/how-to-fix-wordpress/how-to-fix-wordpress-css-not-loading/