Any tips for freelance designing wordpress themes?

 

What does your process look like when you take on a new client's website?

 

Here's my main issue:

 

I've had this problem when designing with Magento in the past: I don't want to make edits to the layout that go live on the clients site as I do them (just in case I make a mistake). In the past I have created a subdomain that is a copy of the main one, and edited within that. Then when it was time to go live I copied the entire thing.

 

Currently I'm editing the layout of a wordpress site, but the edits are fairly small, so it doesn't seem worth it to create a subdomain (plus it can all be done within the CMS rather than FTP).

 

This might even be really easy to do if it was just me making these changes to my own site, however, obviously I don't want to make a mistake! Of course I already plan to back up everything I touch...but

 

There MUST be a simple way to do these edits, 'Preview' them without having them go live as I update pages...right?

 

Thanks for your help.

As a developer you could use either WAMP or MAMP on your local computer and set up a placeholder database for your wordpress theme. Fill it with content and gibberish making sure that you have ALL things included that you're going to include in your theme (different post types, media, galleries, plugins etc) and then you can work on a local system without fear of making a mistake.

 

The advantage to this is that if you run a closed wordpress database locally, you can reuse it when developing themes to save having to enter dummy content for your temporary wordpress database every time.

 

When you're done editing your theme, just upload it to your wordpress install same as always.

Welcome to the forums

 

I don't use Wordpress but in the CMS I use I simply add a conditional to pull in an alternative stylesheet for when I'm logged in as a super admin, that way I can make changes to the live site without affecting what the public sees.

That sounds very clever and when I'm less tired I may try to understand it

 

In the meantime, I do what I think is a variation of what WilliamsGraphics ( William maybe?) said and use Desktop server. http://serverpress.com/products/desktopserver/ (just the free version so far)

Thanks WilliamsGraphics! I went with MAMP. I am sure this will save me a lot of headaches.

 

Jane B- I followed this tutorial and got the local server working in no time:

 

http://wp.smashingmagazine.com/2011/09/28/developing-wordpress-locally-with-mamp/

I used WAMP before I installed the Server Press thing. Not sure why it seemed to me to be a good idea to change - I expect it made sense to me at the time, or perhaps I just fancied a change

I would definitely recommend using MAMP/WAMP locally before staging the site on a testing server for the client to give the thumbs up before putting it live on their server.

 

If you are ever in a position where you absolutely have to edit CSS/template files live, grab a plugin that puts the site into maintenance mode so the public won't see whats going on in the background.

I have recently gone one stage further, invested a little time and effort and installed a Ubuntu partition on my hard drive. Then within a couple of day's I had a fully 'server like the real thing' installed. It out strips what you can do in WAMPP, XAMPP, or IIS by far. (Have never used MAMP but I assume it is much the same) Configuration is so much simpler as the apache2 HTTP server configuration files are all directly accessible through the terminal and vim.

 

No trying to work out what the GUI is trying to make you go, or using Notepad to blindly search file content. If your not sure were to look us 'man -k term' and all you will need is right there in front of you. Even security options and control is simpler, quicker, and more secure! Plus the whole thing doesn't get corrupted by Microsoft's so called updates!

 

On top of all of this you can even create multiple invocations of the same app on the same server just like having multiple visitors to a live site without having any OS complaints or conflicts simply by opening a new tab in the SAME browser and login in with new credentials to the site. So easy to test what you have done!