testing with new theme without disrupting users

You can install a theme either via the admin or by uploading it via FTP. If you want to upload it and it is in a zip file, you have to unzip it first. You can also download a theme via FTP, change it’s name in the stylesheet and then upload it to a different folder to have an active copy and a development copy.

When you say “give the theme a new name in the stylesheet” you’re referring to the style.css file, right? The only place I see a reference to a name is in the comments — does WP read the comments of that file?

At the top of the stylesheet (style.css), you usually see something like this:

/*
Theme Name: Lines Of Excellence
Theme URI: https://linesofexcellence.com
Description: Custom Theme for Lines Of Excellence Consulting LLC
Author: John Nasta
Author URI: https://johnnasta.com/blog/
Version: 0.1
.
General comments/License Statement if any.
.
*/

You can just change the theme name to Development Theme or whatever you want.

When you say that you are seeing the theme name in the comments are you referring to the public side of the web site or the code?

Oops…imprecise wording on my part. I think you and I are talking about the same thing — the Theme Name (Lines Of Excellence in your example). The two versions of Cutline I’m using have the same name. I didn’t realize that the stuff inside the /* */ mattered. I’ll experiment with changing the names.

Actually, it appears that the theme manager appends the version number to the name, so that shouldn’t be what was causing the confusion.

I’ll do some more experimenting, but one way or another, it looks like the Test Drive works well.

install your wp site locally. test everything and anything without disrupting anything online.

The plugin works when you add ?theme=whatever to your URL. It only looks for theme by name, not by version number.

p.s. You would want to make a copy of the database as Adiant explained if you are writing something that will alter the database in some way, but if you just want to display cosmetic changes, the plugin is the easier way to go.

@theblacksheep That’s a good idea. I’ve never done it but it’s probably not too difficult.

See Installing WordPress there’s a section at the end about it.

Oops, I am so wrong. The plugin looks for the theme by the name of the FOLDER it’s in, not by the theme name. Still it’s a good idea not to run two themes that have the same exact name concurrently.

when i first installed wp, i installed a copy locally, wanted to test a brand new theme as i developed it from scratch, it’s the best way to go if you don’t want to interfere with anything online. make a copy of your current install locally, then when you’ve tested it all and are happy with it, upload it to your live server and it’s all done.

The plugin works when you add ?theme=whatever to your URL. It only looks for theme by name, not by version number.

WordPress evidently looks at both. But I think Test Drive only looks at the name. I solved this by putting the version number in the name. The version number appears twice now in the themes dashboard, but I can live with that.

BlackSheep: if you install it locally, don’t you need LAMP and all that? I didn’t want to go to that much trouble on my desktop system.

lamp, wamp, xamp, mamp, whichever, depending on your system. to be honest, it is no hassle at all, download and install the server. download your wp database and wp root directory. done. that’s pretty much it.

It definitely goes by the folder name. My theme name in this case is Lines Of Excellence but the folder name is LOE. The URL we were using when I was developing it was ?theme=LOE

It definitely goes by the folder name.

To paraphrase a former president, it depends on what your definition of “it” is.

When looking at themes within the WP dashboard, it seems to concatenate the name and the version for identification purposes.

Test Drive doesn’t do this. And, judging from the themes list in the pulldown, it doesn’t seem to look at the folder name, either. At least not the entire folder name. When I had two folders with the same theme name in the stylesheet, it was getting somewhat confused (at least the theme names presented in the pulldown were a bit muddled). But, this is a minor nit, and has been fixed by appending the version to the theme name in the stylesheet.