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

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.