Creating a new Theme in 1.5

symantix
(@symantix)

19 years, 2 months ago

In another thread, someone was wondering about keeping one theme visible to the public, while working on another theme in the background. Kafkaesqui said “This sort of thing is going to be SO much easier in 1.5 with Themes…”

I’m running 1.5, and I worked on a theme all this past weekend, and I didn’t find it to be any easier. I thought maybe I could insert a variable into the web address that would cause the theme I was working on to appear for me, while the active theme would show for everyone else, but I couldn’t get it to work this way. I did several searches on the forums, and couldn’t find any method of doing this sort of thing. I just ended up having to shut my site down to the public while I worked on it.

I’m sure I just don’t understand something. That’s the reason for this thread. Can someone explain to me the easy way of doing this in 1.5?

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

Kafkaesqui
(@kafkaesqui)

19 years, 2 months ago

When I said that, I should have made it clear it would be in conjunction with a styleswitcher app/plugin that supports the new Themes utility.

Using Firefox with the Web Developer extension, I myself test changes (small or large) to my site through the Edit CSS and Add User Stylesheet features. As long as I’m not making alterations to the template structure, this lets me test out mods in place. But even this is troublesome, since I must keep loading a stylesheet for each click-through on my site.

Despite my enthusiastic indiscretion, in all honesty I don’t see a way of making things as simple as a button click or variable change to have it be truly easy for those trying out different designs. Unless I’m missing something…

TechGnome
(@techgnome)

19 years, 2 months ago

Yeah, I saw that post too and wondered what he’s smoking (And why he wasn’t sharing?) The easiest way I’ve found so far to build themes has to been to do it all off-line. My last two templates/themes (current: http://tannagh.com old: http://techgnome.anderson-website.net ) were created from scratch. I first created an html file, added the div tags where I wanted them, added in the CSS file, and kept tweaking it until I had a workable set of files. Toss in some test text just to make sure. Then I renamed it from an html file to a php file. I then added in the WP calls in the appropriate places where I wanted the content to be. For testing it out on an actual server with “real” data though, I use my local machine. I’ve got Apache & MySQL & PHP loaded on it, so that helps some. If I want to test it on my live server (for purposes of validation) I name it index2.php and load it on to my live site, then access it directly.

Because 1.5 actualy stores the current template/theme name in the db, and makes the calls itself, this becomes a bit harder…. don’t know if there’s a way around it or not…. hope so.

Tg

Thread Starter symantix
(@symantix)

19 years, 2 months ago

lol…Well, that’s pretty much the way I did it, TG. But my current site is so involved, and has so many custom aspects to it, that it eventually got to a point to where I was going to have to see my template integrated with my real site, because duplicating all the code and changing the hard-coded urls in the posts to get my db to work in another directory would be a real pain.

But the way 1.5 is set up, I can see it being real easy to do some background re-design while the live site is still running. But I sure didn’t see any way to do it as is.

Thanks for the input. And if anyone creates a style-switcher, be sure that you can control it with a variable in the URL. 🙂

Ryan Boren
(@ryan)

19 years, 2 months ago

Just adapt the theme manager to set a differenent cookie, say wp_test_theme. Set this to the theme you are working on. You could call the plugin the Preview Theme Manager or somesuch and have it hook into on of the admin filters so that a dropdown or list is presented somewhere convenient.

kbfrench
(@kbfrench)

19 years, 2 months ago

Actually, probably the cleanest way would be to have a plugin that creates a third category of theme: Current Theme Developing Theme, and Other Themes. The test theme would generate the entire weblog, using the test theme, under a subfolder category (say “develop,” or even “wp-content/themes/develop”).

Hm…