A program favored by lots of WordPress Theme developers is Xampp. This program. after installing it in your computer lets you modify your themes to your heart’s content offline so even if you screw up big time, there are no worries it will affect your blog. It is a very useful program if you want to learn modding your WordPress Theme.
Xampp can be downloaded for free and my favorite version is the xampp lite. Scroll down and read the instructions on how to install the program first before deciding which package you want but I think you should choose the one with the installer. There shouldn’t be any problem if you follow the instructions closely.
Once you have it installed, the first thing you have to do is to upload the latest version of WordPress to xammp. Read this tutorial on how to installing xammp and WordPress Mind you, when you are running xammp, it feels and looks exactly like as though you are online and sometimes you can get carried away thinking you are really online.
Now that everything is in place and you can access your “Offline Blog”, the next part is to upload the theme you want to modify. Inside the xampp folder you will find the folder htdocs, the one which you have installed WordPress in. Open htdocs - wordpress- wp-content- themes. With the themes folder opened, copy whichever theme you want into this folder. That is the noobest way. If you are good in working and extracting zip files, you can extract the theme directly into that folder.
Once that is done, start Xampp, go to your “Offline Blog”’s dashboard-presentation-themes and you should see your newly uploaded theme, just like you have uploaded any new themes to your real blog. From here on, everything is exactly like what you would do when you are logged in to your theme. You can do whatever you like here, only keep reminding yourself you are modding your Wordpress Theme offline and nobody will see you screw up.
To access your “offline blog”, just key in “localhost” without the double quotes in any browser.
Yup. Forgot to mention that. Thanks
Love XAMPP. Since discovering it, I don’t have to wait till off-peak hours to tinker around with themes. I now do a little theme development as a hobby.
Just something you missed out, there is MAMP for Macintosh and LAMP for Linux. XAMPP is primarily Windows, it is still in Beta for mac. But it is the least resource intensive way of making changes to your theme.
sicarii
Yes, me too and I mus say I have learned a thing or two about css with all my ruthless disemboweling of Themes.
Darran
Again thanks! Would love to hear your input in my latest post on inserting header images for themes that does not includes them.
Thanks for your information on uploading the themes to a localhost Wordpress. I followed your instructions and the new theme is one of three in my htdocs/wpcontent/themes/ file with default and classic. Xampp is running but it does not show up in my theme file in the localhost.
Any suggestions?
Thanks
Hi Jane,
From the little you have said, I assume you have read the instructions at the download page and configured xammp and installed wordpress correctly.
If you have, just log in by typing the word, localhost, in your browser with xammp running, go to your wordpress admin and activate the theme.
Thank you very much. I worked it out.