Theme Tester – Awesome Wordpress Plugin

I’ve been working on a re-design for Search Engine Snark for the last week or so, which has been greatly made possible by the Theme Tester plugin (direct from WPDO here). It’s like a mini dev environment for Wordpress, which continues to display your current theme to all users except for administrators (for 99% of all Wordpress blogs this will be, um, you), which will be shown the theme that you’re working on. Once you flip the switch on the plugin, it’ll revert all users to the new theme.

So, you can change out themes, play around with designs and dink around your CSS with your current content loaded without changing the user experience for everyone else.

I’ve run into some caching interestingness with this that has sometimes required me to open a new window every time I want to see the effects of a design, which can be a pain. For the most part, this has led me to instead use Web Developer to edit CSS and HTML (sometimes cheating with Firebug), then copying and pasting the changes back into the WordPress UI. Still kind of a pain, but vastly more useful than trading back and forth or trying to judge using the preview functions.

To top it all off, the developer has a winningly Gaelic name – perfect for a St. Patrick’s day-adjacent discovery. Thank you (and Slainte), Donnca O Caoimh, for a badass plugin.

Oh, and new design coming soon, keep your eyes peeled…

Mom says there are no posts that are like me. I am unique.

Tags:   design · sotware · win · wordpress · wordpress optimization · wordpress seo Share on Twitter

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