DEVELOPING_THEMES.md

Developing WordPress themes with PressPass

PressPass helps you develop WordPress themes in a convenient way.

We use and suggest the following workflow:

Create your local WordPress installation

With the instructions from the README, create a clean WordPress installation and configure it through the WordPress installer. In this example Code is the directory where we store all our projects.

cd Code
presspass new my_blog --php /usr/local/bin/php-cgi

gem install rack rack-legacy rack-rewrite
ln -s ~/Code/my_blog ~/.pow/my_blog

open http://myblog.dev/

Starting with a theme from scratch

At ~/Code/my_theme create an empty theme directory with at least the required style.css file with the theme metadata so WordPress shows it in the admin. If you'd like to, you can initialize a git repository here and push it to for example GitHub.

Then, symlink the theme directory into the wp-content/themes directory of the WordPress installation:

ln -s ~/Code/my_theme ~/Code/my_blog/wp-content/themes/my_theme

Go to your WordPress admin and switch to the theme.

Or, clone an existing theme from GitHub

Just like when starting a theme from scratch. Clone your theme to some directory in ~/Code:

git clone [email protected]:michiels/my_theme ~/Code/my_theme

Then, symlink it into your WordPress installation:

ln -s ~/Code/my_theme ~/Code/my_blog/wp-content/themes/my_theme

Code, commit and repeat!

The working directory where you can make changes to your theme will be ~/Code/my_theme. So, just make your changes, commit and repeat.