WordPress Theming Tools for Your Mac

Comments 11 by Rebecca Bollwitt

Over the last few weeks my company, sixty4media, has themed, coded, and tweaked quite a few WordPress sites (and even more over the years before we even had the company). I am often asked what I use to code or theme so here are some of the tools that make my life a whole lot easier.

MAMP
MAMP allows you to run a mini WordPress web server from your computer so that you can theme sites locally, without having them published online or on a development site.

FTP
You need a good FTP application for uploading files and images on the fly. I’m using Cyberduck right now but I’ve had many suggestions for more productive tools (and I can’t for the life of me remember the one that Tod recommended).

Smultron
For Mac OS X and Leopard
A great text editor (used for PHP files) that works nicely with Cyberduck by selecting it as your file editor under preferences. It colour-codes nicely and is very simple to use.

CSS Edit
MacRabbit – CSS Edit (for Macs only)
All in one CSS editing tool. Allows you to eyedrop colours, shows your properties in a sidebar, knows where to place brackets etc. and even auto-completes some elements. In the sidebar it also displays colours on anything that has a background colour ie. if your footer is blue, it will show up blue in the sidebar list.

WordPress Codex
This last one isn’t downloadable, the codex is an online resource for all issues, questions, and reference materials in the WordPress realm.

This has also been published on sixty4media’s blog.

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11 Comments  —  Comments Are Closed

  1. Duane StoreyTuesday, December 2nd, 2008 — 11:40am PST

    Good suggestions. I use CyberDuck as well, but have been told Transmit is a lot nicer.

    Also, I recommend everyone use the Safari Tidy plugin as well, since it validates all pages as you view them and puts a little count of the validation errors in the corner. It’s a lot easier to correct them as they spring up then deal with a huge batch at the end. Has made for much cleaner code on my side, and less cross-browser problems.

  2. JP HoleckaTuesday, December 2nd, 2008 — 11:49am PST

    I think that Transmit is best in Mac ftp software. I just started using CSS Edit last week and think it is fantastic.

  3. Danny DangTuesday, December 2nd, 2008 — 11:54am PST

    I use CyberDuck as well, for my text editor I’ve been trying out BBEdit which I like. I’ll give Smultron a try!

  4. Tris HusseyTuesday, December 2nd, 2008 — 11:57am PST

    Few got all of those! Course between you, John, and others you told me what to download. At least I listen.

    Duane I think I’ve heard the same about Transmit, but it isn’t free is it?

  5. ChrisTuesday, December 2nd, 2008 — 2:15pm PST

    Its not free but i like Coda for editing code.

    It allows you to edit files directly on the server so its easy to fix those inevitable little mistakes.

    http://www.panic.com/coda

  6. Miss604Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008 — 2:19pm PST

    @ Chris – I think Duane mentioned to us the other day that he uses Coda since you can have two people editing at the same time (?) That would really be ideal for us as well.

  7. Ryan DempseyTuesday, December 2nd, 2008 — 5:00pm PST

    Coda user here. Made by the same guys who mad Transmit, and comes with a Transmit like ftp, as well as a CSS editor (not quite as nice as CSSEdit but almost), terminal, svn integration and reference books. It’s replaced CSSEdit, CyberDuck, svnx and even Textmate for me.

  8. Tyler IngramWednesday, December 3rd, 2008 — 7:40am PST

    Bah to all you Mac users 😉 (tad bit jealous)

    For Windows I just use Notepad++ to do ALL my coding lol. PHP, MySQL, CSS, HTML, Javascript etc etc. I’d use notepad but I like my syntax to be colour highlighted 🙂

    Rebecca, do you and John use a separate web server for your development? If not, what do you two use? Think I remember seeing a subdomain? I find that using a separate machine (ubuntu with Samba, Apache, MySQL etc) I can do design/development offline, check them and then upload them if they are good to go. Though I guess if you use a subdomain then you can easily show clients their work without it being live too huh?

  9. Dennis Bjørn PetersenThursday, December 4th, 2008 — 1:27am PST

    FileZilla is a really good and free FTP-alternative. It’s very simple and I use it on both PC and Mac.

    http://filezilla-project.org/

  10. links for 2008-12-07 « Jeff’s random thoughtsSunday, December 7th, 2008 — 3:03pm PST

    […] WordPress Theming Tools for Your Mac (tags: wordpress tools mac) […]

  11. RestaurantSunday, December 14th, 2008 — 8:44am PST

    I think that Transmit is best in Mac ftp software. I just started using CSS Edit last week and think it is fantastic.

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