How to Manage the Sandbox in WordPress

Test-drive a new design for your site with a sandbox.

WordPress is versatile software that you can use to create a blog or static website. A WordPress sandbox is a way for you to test-run modifications to your website without the worry of unwanted permanent changes to your site. Making changes to a live site could adversely affect your visitors. Whether your sandbox is online or on your computer, managing it effectively will ensure your test project runs smoothly.

Instructions

1. Open the .css file from your WordPress site. You can open the .css file in any text editor like Notepad.

2. Open a Web browser, and then open the page you want to work on.

3. Make a change to the .css file, and then refresh your browser to see the changes. For example, if you want to change the background color of your site to gray, type "body{ background-color: gray;}".

4. When you are finished making changes, move the style.css style sheet file to your WordPress Theme folder on your website, replacing the old file. Make sure to load graphics and images to relevant folder.

Tips & Warnings

• Add comments to your code before you start playing with your sandbox or before you make significant changes to the code. Comments can help you backtrack your work. For example, you may want to make a comment before each page division. To make a comment, type <! - - this is a comment - -> as a line in your code.

• Make small changes at a time, and then check your work by refreshing the browser. Small steps are much easier to recover from than major code changes.

• Back up your files frequently. For example, you save the files hourly to an external drive so you always have a record of your changes and can revert back to a previous sandbox version if you don't like what you see.

References

• WordPress: Creating a Sandbox
• Tizag: CSS Tutorial