I’m working on developing my first WordPress theme. As of now, I’ve just been coding the files, zipping my theme folder, and then uploading and activating the theme in my WordPress Dashboard to test it.
However, this has become quite tedious, as I basically have to:
1) code a bit of my theme, zip into folder
2) deactivate/remove old version of theme in WordPress dashboard
3) upload new version of theme, and activate
4) repeat…
I’d like to install WordPress locally, but I don’t quite understand how to do that yet, and I’m not familiar setting up a local webserver.
SO… rather than do it the tedious way that I have been, is it OK to just make sure my theme is activated, and then edit my files and overwrite/upload them to the wp themes folder over FTP using Filezilla?
I’m guessing it’d be considered bad practice, but for the time being would this work well enough until I learn a better way?
That’s definitely okay.
You can modify the files locally and then upload the changes using FTP. Make sure you have backups so if you accidentally FTP the wrong changes you can easily revert them.
Yes you can absolutely download the uncompressed theme and modify and put it back using ftp.
Also, some themes support whats called a child theme. This allows you to override the theme with your changes, without changing the original source code. Which in turn gives you a better upgrade path from the original theme provider when they have updates.
I have actually had some weird formatting issues with WP after manually editing files, where they would no longer run, so I try to avoid it. But I have bad luck that time.