edit new theme (but do not display while editing)

You can disable the theme switcher and select a theme that you are not working on. Then when you have finished your behind the scenes editing, you can turn the theme switcher back on.

As long as you don’t enable theme switching, then your visitors will only see the SELECTED theme.

But how will I be able to view the changes I made?

’bout the only ways I know of: either install xampp from apachefriends.org or another local server setup and run a test install locally; install a test (“sandbox”) word press on your web server; or do it locally in html for just the “look”.

ah. thanks!

How can I do it with html?

You’ll be using PHP. And I highly recommend YellowTip. I’ve tried Apache Triad and some of the others, but I never could get all three to run. YellowTip was up and running and coexisting peacefully with all my other home networking equipment in no time.

https://www.yellowtip.com/products/yellowtipws.php

Hmm. I’m beginning to think this is way beyond anything I can do.

Thanks for the suggestions though!

You may try the theme preview plugin
https://boren.nu/archives/2005/03/08/preview-theme-plugin/

Moshu, thank you! That’s exactly what I was looking for. But…how do I activate it? It’s different than other plugins. What exactly do I download?

Just save this file https://boren.nu/downloads/preview_theme.phps as .php and upload it in your pluign dir.
Activate it.
After that in your address bar where it says:
www.yoursite.com/blog you can type
www.yoursite.com/blog/index.php?preview_theme=yourtheme

Hmm, I tried that and it put weird stuff in my plugin directory. It looked like a huge link.

hmmm… copy the content of that link above into an empty text file and save it as .php file.
Warning: check for empty space at the beginning and at the end!

Perfect. That worked. Thank you so much!

But now how do I use it? I typed: https://www.superjux.com/index.php?preview_theme=imhotep which is the theme I want to preview, but I just get the gentle calm theme still…

Moshu? Can you still help me please?

I’ll try ??