WordPress can be used in conjunction with Dreamweaver for creating and editing WordPress themes.
WordPress is a well-designed content management system. This open source platform has become a popular tool for bloggers due to its simple structure, as well as its ability to separate style from content. You can edit the content of your blog without having to edit the theme and vice versa, making it easy to change the content and the appearance of the blog separately.
Although WordPress itself does not support any built-in coding tools that allow you to make significant changes to a theme, you can use software such as Dreamweaver to create, edit and view WordPress theme files.
Using Dreamweaver, you can create and customize your WordPress themes. Here are some tips for editing your WordPress themes using Dreamweaver.
In order to view your live WordPress theme on your computer within Dreamweaver, you will first need to set-up a local web server. You have to install WordPress, and create a site within Dreamweaver with a properly configured testing server.
Step 1: Installing the Local Web Server
The local web server you will need to install for WordPress is XAMPP for Windows. This server will set up your local PHP server environment, which is necessary for viewing WordPress theme files.
Step 2: Installing WordPress
Installing WordPress is necessary to enable you to display the theme files properly. Download the latest release of WordPress, then unzip the files. Follow the rest of the WordPress instructions and you will find yourself at the WordPress Dashboard.
From there WordPress Dashboard you can do all the things on your local computer that you can do on a remote server with WordPress, including creating and editing posts, downloading and changing themes, adding plug-ins, etc.
Step 3: Set Up Local Dreamweaver Site
Set up a local Dreamweaver site using your WordPress theme. This local Dreamweaver site will act as a “chopping block” for your theme from where you will use the editing tools to change the presentation of your theme.
Create a folder on your local drive and unzip your downloaded theme. You will now have all the components of your theme ready for editing in Dreamweaver. You can now access both your local and remote theme files through here.
Step 4: Get Your Blog onto Dreamweaver
The next step is to get the complete code from your blog page into Dreamweaver, in order to edit it. In a browser, open your remote blog and click on the ‘view’ menu.
Click on ‘Source’ and you will see the source code for your blog. You can highlight the entire code, copy it, and then paste it into a new HTML document in Dreamweaver.
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