Theme Development on Existing Site

  • mleder

    (@mleder)


    8 years, 2 months ago

    I host an existing client WP site which has literally 1000’s of articles , images, and content. The client wants a theme refresh (using a different theme). I’ve been researching ways to do this. Ideally I’d be able to set up a dev site, tweak the theme (using a child), then move it into the existing site and change to the new theme and it would all work.

    I’m really concerned about all this, because from what I’ve been able to gather, picking up and moving a theme only to a live site is not as smooth as I would think. In particular, most theme builders post their parameters inside wp-options table. I’m afraid in a move that this table would get overwritten.

    Are there best practices for achieving what I want to do? Some say, create a subdomain, then port it over, but I don’t know how the subdomain would pick up the primary domains tables.

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  • RossMitchell

    (@rossmitchell)

    8 years, 2 months ago

    Of course you take a backup snapshot of your present database and files, this goes without saying.

    Many options and settings in the options table are saved as as key > value pairs where the key includes the theme name as a prefix, so menus etc have to be recreated when you change theme, similarly if you change back to a prior theme then the old settings come back.

    What you could do is use a moving WordPress plugin such as “Duplicator” etc and make a copy of the present site to use a subdomain. Work upon your new theme customization and settings at the subdomain, get the client and key site users to trial it etc. THEN use “Duplicator” etc to copy the subdomain site to the main site. Again you keep backups of each phase.

    A different approach that I have used, which seems to be unconventional and I don’t know why, is to take the snapshot of the present site, and set it up on a localhosted using the “VirtualHost” configuration method under the SAME domain name, the website barely knows it has moved. You work on the website but now when you need the client to see it, you use “teamviewer” (from teamviewer.com) to have the client view your screen from their computer, this is actually a bonus since you get to mediate the session (have them on the phone at the same time, or skype). Then when you want to deploy the new theme, you upload the theme files (and other new files), and export the database from the localhost and import it on the main site.
    The critical docs for this technique are:
    – configuring VirtualHost http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/vhosts/name-based.html
    – using the hosts file https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hosts_(file)

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