There are a “big” and a “small” solution:
1. The “big” solution: download XAMPP
XAMPP is freeware and installs at your PC-Windows-drive in minuts a complete Apache/MySQL/PHP-enviroment (very easy to install). So you can install a full WordPress system at your harddisk, can modify in Topstyle the CSS and refresh in IE the http://locoalhost/wordpress/index.php. This is what I do.
You can download XAMPP via http://www.apachefriends.org/
2. The “small” solution: take an offline spider
Go to your blog URL and than grab the first page with an offline software. There are a lot freeware and shareware programs, but most of them have problems with php pages. I use “Metaproducts Offline Explorer” – it’s Shareware, but it works. Maybe there is any freeware working software (look at http://www.webattack.com).
This offline programs are grabbing a static html page of your index page, together with the local path to the right CSS. So you have after this per example a page like http://download/index.html, which you can put into your browser and can refresh (after modifikations of CSS) this statik page.
i was so close to give up and go back to the traditional method. and thats great news. you have open up a whole new world for me. thank you, i will try them out and let you know how it goes. thank you once again
aragorn: there’s always hope!
Is it possible to configure Topstyle to preview the page within the program itself, so I don’t have to flip back and forth between it and my browser? I see it is easy with WP 1.2, as the index.php file is in the root. What about with WP 1.5, where the root index.php calls the theme index.php file?
I use WP 1.4 and tried to load the theme index.php file, but the Topstyle preview produces this error:
“Fatal error: Call to undefined function get_header() in C:apachefriendsxampphtdocswp-contentthemesdefault_ts3tmp.php on line 1”
