Wordpress theme development offline tools

Question

Are there any offline tools available for Wordpress theme development other than Dreamweaver extentions?

I'm looking for something that renders a page in a Gecko (or related widget) window in response to my editing of the theme code so I don't need keep editing files on a web server.

Any ideas?

EDIT: Should have been more clear. I have test servers in place I was just looking for an application that shows a representation of the standard wordpress views (index,archive,single post etc) and a basic syntax highlighting editor.

Answer 1

Have you considered running a local server on your PC? It's easier than you think, there are now dead-easy installers which come with apache-php-mysql pre-configured. I recommend xampp.

Answer 2

@kevin d: Definitely my choice as well. You can also use a virtual appliance with VMWare (completely free) to keep everything tidy and isolated from your main system if you're concerned about that.

Answer 3

Wow, I can't believe this bit of software doesn't exist and it's not just my google foo escaping me.

If I didn't have lots going on at the moment I'd write it.

Saint_groceon's virtual appliance method would be ideal if I was developing Apache modules but I think it's overkill in this case, I've bookmarked it for the next time I want a server I can bork to my hearts content and don't want to plug in the Ultra 10 I generally use for an offline test server.

Thanks for your answers anyway guys.

Answer 4

As the Wordpress theme files include only partial pages (eg. header.php, footer.php, etc.), you actually need a PHP interpreter to display a whole page; you even need PHP to link the CSS file.

I'm sure you could build a specific piece of software, but it's much easier to install a local server, install Wordpress, and work on your theme locally. This way you don't have the FTP delays.

I like Wampserver myself.

Answer 5

Christian

You'd need a widget to render the page, php to parse the code and logic to glue it all together, mimicking the database and wordpress install (nicely documented). Nothing that isn't possible or even that hard. I'm just surprised it doesn't exist already. Like I said if I wasn't busy with family commitments at the moment I'd think it's only a day or two of coding to hit public beta.

Answer 6

@sparkles

That "widget" already exists...it's called Apache...

Answer 7

EDIT: Should have been more clear. I have test servers in place I was just looking for an application that shows a representation of the standard wordpress views (index,archive,single post etc) and a basic syntax highlighting editor.

What about saving HTML of a standard page and editing that in Dreamweaver?

Answer 8

Check out this starter theme:

http://wpthemerkit.com/

Its not exactly what you are looking for but it will get you a good start as far as what the pages would look like (see the html files included in each of the themes). For common WP functions, I do not believe there is an editor with intellisense support - I think the Wordpress documentation is the best that you will get. Does that help any?

Answer 9

A new answer for an old thread. Check Design for Sandbox Theme in a sandbox. Basically, it's a static Wordpress dump. If you don't want to download the files, the page looks somewhat like this (but not exactly).

You can then edit the styles. One caveat: you have to plug your stylesheets in the sandbox theme which produces this specific markup.