Support » Themes and Templates » Typical newbie question…

  • How do you guys (inclusive guys, as in including the females out there) develop your templates without messing around with your production site. I realize I could load mySQL and a web server on my PC, but that seems a little drastic for designing templates. Surely theres an easier way?

    Just wondering what I’m missing.

    Regards
    Bill R.

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  • There are two ways.

    1) If bandwidth and space consumption, then install WordPress to a new folder on your site and make sure you following the instructions on stopping robots and others from gaining access. It will set up a new database (make sure it has a name different from your original) and go to town. Be sure and turn off comments and trackbacks (pings) so you don’t pick up anything there, too. Once you have it all designed, you can turn these things on to do more testing.

    2) Using either the default template, your current template, or another one close to what you want to design (or with the features you want to include), create a test post and view it in a web browser. Click on VIEW > PAGE SOURCE and copy the HTML into a text file and save it on your harddrive in a separate folder. Put all the graphics and style sheets you want to mess with in the same folder and then start working. You will be working only on the END result, which is what you want anyway, not the individual PHP. If you need to change the PHP, go to technique one. If you just want to change a few bells and whistles, manipulate the HTML into the layout form you want, make lots of notes, and when you are ready to go into the final test phase, make all those changes in the (technique one) WordPress files and start final testing.

    I’m sure there are other methods, but these are the most simple. Does that help?

    Elasticdog’s WP Design Sandbox will also help you by giving you a “test” file to work with while you play with the template. I’m slowly working on another version that features a lot more tags to help figure out the minute details. But this one is great.

    Thread Starter billramby

    (@billramby)

    Thanks. I’ll give it a looksee. My main concern is avoiding dual installs of WordPress. If I can avoid that, I’ll be a happy camper.

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