Edit Blog Theme
Editing your blog theme can often be a major concern for those that are only just learning about how to edit the style.css .
Very often we may not be fully satisfied with our theme or features, perhaps the colours are not what we want, or we find the sidebar is too narrow for a widget, perhaps we are lacking a footer area..?
There could be any number of reasons that we may need to edit our theme, but very often we choose to leave well alone for fear of cocking things up!
Making a mistake could give you some major problems to deal with;
1. You could put your blog offline for hours.
2. You could totally screw up the layout of the page.
3. Because of either of the above, you need to reload the theme & this means losing any previous editing.
4. Any errors can mean a disruption to your readers, who may then look elsewhere..?
The Solution To Editing Your Theme
The solution comes in the form of a small program called Xampp (pronounced Zamp), this is open source software, so no need to reach for your wallet 
This little program creates the equivelant of an Apache server & MySQL database on your own PC, this then enables you to install & run a totally independant version of your blog site on your desktop PC, or as in my case on my laptop! No need for internet connection once this is set up, you can hack away at your theme without any worries or concerns whatsoever and when you’ve finished your editing you simply upload the edited code sheets using FTP.
Note: In order to use Xampp you will need a fresh copy of both your blog database & the home directory.
Follow These Steps To Set Up Xampp
1. Download Xampp Here
2. Double click the Xampp icon to start the install (takes quite a while extracting files)
Note: Although it will happily install on your c:/ drive, I prefer to set this up on a seperate partition of my hard drive. I have a 15gb partition at the back end of my 80gb drive & this is where I keep all website / blog stuff, including the install of Xampp.
3. Press Y to place a shortcut on your desktop
Install Completed
4. Now for a slightly tricky step. You need to find a fresh download of your blog database, right click on it and select “extract to“. Now open the extracted SQL file in a decent text editor, I use Notepad++. Use the search & replace function to find all occurrences of your blog url eg. http://www.your-domain.com & replace with http://localhost/your-domain.com which will be the address of your dummy blog. Now save this edited SQL file for later use.
5. Now select phpMyAdmin from the left hand column under tools, you will need to login! Once you login, then create a database with exactly the same name & password as your original blog database, but without creating any tables.
6. Once you have created the database, use “Import” to import the previously edited SQL file from step 4 above. This is simply a browse to & select process as with any other files.
7. On completion of the import of your database, close & exit phpMyAdmin.
8. Create a folder with the a title in the following format ” your-domain.com “, simply use the url from your blog but without the ” http://www. ” Now copy everything from inside your “public_html” folder and past it into the new folder you just created. This will actually become your home directory of your blog on Xampp.
9. Copy this new folder and then browse to wherever you installed Xampp, double click the Xampp folder and you should then see the following image..?
Highlight the htdocs folder indicated & paste into this the folder you copied in step 9 above, this folder should have a title in the format of ”your-domain.com” without the quotes of course.
10. Now double click the Xampp shortcut on your desk top, to start the Xampp control panel, this will place a control panel at the bottom right corner of your screen as follows.
11. Click the button marked 1. to start the Apache interface. Wait until it reports “Apache Started” and then click button 2. to start the MySql Database.
12. Click the button shown above, this will open a browser widow for http://localhost/xampp/ simply replace the url with http://localhost/your-domain.com and hopefully if you followed the instructions correctly you will now have a fully functioning blog on your own PC or laptop.
What’s The Big Advantage With This..?
Well lets take a look at an extreme example: www.philippines-virtual-guide.com
Original Theme Above & Edited Theme Below
The changes required in editing this theme took me around 3 days to complete, can you imagine the disruption that would have caused to my readers..? Not to mention the risk of a major error in the code & having to start from scratch! As it was my readers were totally unaware of any changes taking place, until such time as I reloaded the edited theme & refreshed the site.
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Related posts:
- Clone WordPress Blog & Create Test Site 7 Easy Steps
- Changing The Domain Name Of Your WP Blog
- Edit Your Themes Stylesheet – Pt 4 Borders
- WP-DBManager Plugin
Posted by Steve (Admin)
on Jan 17 2012. Filed under Hacks & Mods.
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Yes Daniel you can achieve the same thing by using either a sub domain or sub directory, but I suppose the big advantage with Xampp is the fact you do not need any internet connection to make it work !
I know it seems a bit techy, but once you have it set up, it is great, I have 3 sites stored in it and can work on any one of them at any time.
I honestly think this is more professional, but only for advanced users. I know how to do it, but I usually modify my themes on a temporary subdomain