How to work on your blog without anyone having the slightest clue

May 24, 2007  |  By Travis  |  Articles   

Shhh

You’ve got a new plugin you’d like try. Or maybe you’d like to play with your header image. Or maybe you want to see how that colour would look. That doesn’t sound too hard. But there’s one problem. Any changes you apply to your blog will be seen by your readers.

So you create a copy of the theme you’re working on and make your changes to it. You switch back and forth between the two hoping no one catches an early glimpse of your mods while you abuse ctrl + F5 to force view the changes.

Other people might play with the theme on another Wordpress installation. But that’s no fun. You can’t see how your existing posts will look and any formatting issues that may come into play. And some people don’t have the hosting resources for multiple blogs.

With these issues at hand, I’m going to share a fantastic way to “work on your blog without anyone having the slightest clue”.

This is possible thanks to a little plugin called Preview Theme. What this plugin does is allow logged in Admin only, to preview a new theme or modifications to an existing theme, on any page of your blog. It’s really simple.

I’ll walk you through the process.

1 ) Download the Preview Theme plugin here.

2 ) Unzip the folder and upload it to /wp-content/plugins/ on your server.

3 ) Activate the plugin in your Wordpress Admin (Plugins tab -> Preview Theme -> Activate).

That’s it for the plugin. Now we’ll assume you want to test some changes to your current theme without anyone knowing.

4 ) Download a copy of your current theme’s folder to your computer.

5 ) Rename that folder to something simple that you’ll remember (ex. beta, intheworks, etc…)

6 ) In that theme’s folder you just downloaded a copy of, you’ll see a file called style.css. Open that in your coding app of choice. The top line of that file should say the Theme Name. You’ll want to change this to the exact same thing you renamed the folder to in the previous step (ex. beta, intheworks, etc…). Keep it all lowercase.

7 ) Upload that folder that you’ve just renamed into your themes folder on your server (/wp-content/themes/).

8 ) You don’t need to activate that theme. You can forget about it in the Wordpress Admin and upload as many revised files as you wish in the theme’s folder while you work on it.

9 ) Now you can test your preview by adding a little string to the end of any of your blog’s URLs:

?preview_theme=thenameofyourtheme

So it would look like http://www.younggogetter.com/?preview_theme=beta

You can add it to the end of any URL on your blog whether it be a page or individual post, just paste the ?preview_theme=thenameofyourtheme after the last /. So an individual post’s preview would look like:

http://www.younggogetter.com/2007/05/15/this-is-a-post/?preview_theme=beta

That’s pretty much it, in less than 10 easy steps. You can work on or play with a theme and only you, the Admin of your blog, will be able to see the changes.

If you’re working on an existing theme you downloaded, make sure you change the name of it’s folder to lowercase and do the same in it’s style.css file.

If you were hesitant to mess around with your blog or experiment a bit, hopefully this helps you feel a little more comfortable.

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Travis
About the author, Travis
One of the original members at YGG, Travis became a partner back in 2006. He's responsible for all the creative and mischief you see before you.

19 Comments

  1. Ines said on May 24, 2007   

    Amazing!! Thanks for sharing.

  2. Nenad Ristic said on May 24, 2007   

    Brilliant! Thanks a lot for pointing this out, you ahve just made my life a little bit simpler.

  3. Adnan said on May 24, 2007   

    Awesome - nice find and great instructive post Travis!

  4. Mike said on May 24, 2007   

    Wow, I can’t believe I never thought about this before. This post is just in time for me to, because i’ve been working on a new wordpress design. Great tip - thanks!

  5. Dave said on May 24, 2007   

    Excellent! A good alternative to also setting up the blog locally on your PC.

  6. Ryan Christensen said on May 24, 2007   

    Thanks for the tip… this will be very useful!

  7. Matt McDonald said on May 24, 2007   

    Great tip. Scary picture.

  8. Kevin said on May 24, 2007   

    Awesome!

  9. Mat said on May 25, 2007   

    Great post!

  10. Wayde Christie said on May 28, 2007   

    Brilliant! Thank you!

  11. listikal said on June 14, 2007   

    Excellent plugin YGG. I’m going to create a post pointing to your instructions.

  12. Chris said on June 29, 2007   

    Great tutorial … very clear, very helpful. Thanks!

  13. The Happy Rock said on July 3, 2007   

    Like a charm, awesome!

  14. jase said on July 23, 2007   

    Great plugin, but i cannot get it to work! Ive installed it successfully and installed a couple of new themes. Ive renamed the folder and the top line in the css to something really simple and “?preview_theme=” does nothing but refresh the screen. Does anyone have any ideas…its as if the plugin wasnt installed at all.
    Jase

  15. Travis said on July 23, 2007   

    Jase,
    what you have to do is take a look at the stylesheet of the theme you want to preview. At the top of the file will be it’s name, like:

    Theme Name: Modern

    You then take that name and add it to what you said above:

    ?preview_theme=Modern

    The reason you’re not seeing anything now is because you haven’t told it which theme to preview.

    To preview a theme on your blog’s index, it would look like:

    http://www.yourblog.com/index.php?preview_theme=Modern

    Give that a try, should work for you.

  16. Jase said on July 23, 2007   

    Hi Travis, thanks for replying.

    However, the above is exactly what i have been doing.
    Ive uploaded a basic wordpress theme and renamed the folder “beta” and changed the css title to Theme Name: beta and then tried http://www.yourblog.com/index.php?preview_theme=beta but nothing is happening other than a screen refresh.

    Maybe its the theme i am using on my blog. Its called See-you-at-the-beach and ive had problems with other plugins in the past which is the reason why i want to redesign the site using this plug in.

    Back to the drawing board!

  17. Travis said on July 23, 2007   

    Hi Jase,
    Are you able to preview any other themes? Try putting a few new themes into your themes folder and previewing any of them.

    That’ll help you determine whether it’s your blog or the preview plugin.

  18. N. said on August 25, 2007   

    That is a very cool article. I modified the plugin to add an easy way to preview the themes. The little hack I did creates a page in the Presentation tab called Preview Themes. It will list the themes installed in the same way as they are listed in the Themes page. All you’d have to do is click the screenshot to preview the theme you like.

    If you like, you can get the hacked version of the plugin from my website at http://blog.oneortheother.info/?p=167

    N.

  19. Redesigning Your Wordpress Theme? Do It Behind The Scenes With This Plugin said on November 25, 2007   

    [...] VIA [...]

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