How To Edit WordPress Themes With Dreamweaver

WordPress is a well-designed open source platform for blogging, and can be used in conjunction with Dreamweaver for creating and editing WordPress themes.

WordPress is a well-designed, open source platform that has become a popular tool for bloggers due to its simple structure, as well as its ability to separate style from content. This means that 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 doesn’t offer 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. If you have Dreamweaver, then you have all the tools you need to get started creating and customising your WordPress themes.

Here are some tips for editing your WordPress themes using Dreamweaver.

Getting Started

In order to view your live WordPress theme on your computer within Dreamweaver, you will first need to set-up a local web server, so install WordPress, and create a site within Dreamweaver with a properly configured testing server. It sounds like a lot of work for building a theme, however you only need to do all this once in order to edit multiple themes.

Installing the Local Web Server

The local web server you will need to install for WordPress is XAMPP for Windows, and MAMP for Mac OS X. This will set up your local PHP server environment, which is necessary for viewing WordPress theme files.

Installing WordPress

Installing WordPress is necessary to enable you to display the theme files properly. Visit http://wordpress.org/download to download the latest release of WordPress, then unzip the files and place the contents of the folder in the htdocs folder of your system, which was created when you installed the web server (XAMPP or MAMP). Follow the rest of the WordPress instructions and you will find yourself at the WordPress Dashboard. From there 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.

Set Up Local Dreamweaver Site

The next step is to set up a local Dreamweaver site using your WordPress theme. This 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. Simply 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 and you can access both your local and remote theme files through here.

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. Open your remote blog in a browser and click on the ‘view’ menu. Click on ‘Source’ and you will see the source code for your blog. You will want to highlight all of the code, copy it, and then paste it into a new HTML document in Dreamweaver.

For more comprehensive tutorials, it is highly recommended that you take an adobe course that will provide more detailed Dreamweaver training for beginner bloggers. It seems quite complex at first, so having a one-on-one tutorial is invaluable if you want to become a proficient blogger.