12 WordPress Plugins for Theme Development
Published March 31st, 2009 in DesignOne of the great things about using WordPress as a content management system is the huge community of users and all of the resources that are available. While all plugins could be used by theme developers, the ones featured in this post have features that can be especially helpful for various aspects of theme development.
If you design and develop themes for you own use, custom themes for clients, premium themes for sale, or free themes to distribute, I think some of these plugins will be very useful to you.
When you’re designing and developing a WordPress theme, you obviously won’t want the public to see your theme until it is ready. However, it’s helpful to also be able to test the theme in a live environment in attempt to find any flaws before officially changing over to the new theme. The Theme Switch plugin will allow you to control what theme is seen by logged in users with specific access privilege, and what theme is shown to regular visitors. This is a great way to test your theme before going live. It’s especially useful when you’re designing a new theme for an existing site or blog.
Theme Test Drive is another plugin that was created for testing a theme without showing it to everyone. It works in a similar fashion to Theme Switch, so you can look at the details of each, test them and see which one you like best.
WordPress Theme Demo was developed to help web designers who want to showcase demos of their themes. If you visit sites of premium themes sellers, or those who give away free themes, there is usually an option to view the theme on a demo blog. This plugin allows you to showcase demos of multiple themes on one WordPress installation.
Although theme development will be done in a way that doesn’t impact an existing site, there may be some times when you need to make changes that would be better to not be visible to everyone. The Maintenance Mode is a good plugin to have handy for times when you would like to temporarily prevent visitors from seeing the site or theme in it’s current state. With this plugin visitors will get a customizable message until you are ready for the site to be viewed.
If you’ve developed themes in a test environment you may have found that you tend to login and logout a lot, or login as different users. The User Switching plugin was created to make this a quicker, less painful process. With one click you can swicth from one user to another.
This is a plugin that I just came across and have not used yet, but it looks promising. Raw HTML allows you to use raw HTML or any other code in your posts or pages. This may be especially useful if you are converting an existing static site to WordPress. There have been times when I worked on a project like this and had extra work because of the way WordPress dealt with code that was pasted from an existing page.
If you’ve developed a number of different WordPress-based sites you know that each site tends to have it’s own unique needs and challenges, especially when focusing on using WordPress as a CMS more so than just a blogging platform. Advanced Category Excluder allows you to easily have control over what content is available in specific places. You can exclude certain categories from the front page and/or RSS feeds. You can control what content will be included or excluded from search results.
Simply Exclude offers similar functionality to Advanced Category Excluder. If you’re interested in this type of plugin, take a look at both and see which one looks like it will meet your needs.
Looking to use sIFR with WordPress? This plugin makes it easy. You can handle pretty much everything from within the WordPress dashboard and take advantage of sIFR’s ability to have more control and wider choices with fonts.
Much like the previous plugin, FLIR for WordPress will give you more control over the fonts used, but obviously it uses FLIR (Facelift Image Replacement) instead of sIFR. Again, with this plugin almost everything can be controlled from within the WP dashboard.
With TDO Mini Forms you can set up forms for visitors to fill out that are used to create posts. Non-registered users can enter data into highly customizable forms, this information is then stored in drafts until an administrator approves it for publishing. Many sites that include a community news section are using TDO Mini Forms.
This isn’t technically a plugin, but I wanted to include it because it can be so helpful for theme designers and developers. WPCandy has put together a set of posts that will help you by providing sample content that can easily be imported into your WordPress blog (importing is very easy in the WP dashboard). If you’re working on a theme on a WordPress installation that has no content, this will save you some time as opposed to entering your own dummy content.
What Plugins Do You Use for Theme Development?
If you use any plugins in your own theme development, please feel free to share in the comments.
55 Responses to “12 WordPress Plugins for Theme Development”
I use a lot of these in addition to LaunchPad – it’s a theme instead of a plugin, but I use it with Theme Test Drive so I have a nice coming soon landing page while I’m working on my themes.
I do not really use any plugins for development. I do it myself. I am way faster like that.
Hey Thanks for mentioning my Simply Exclude. I have a ton of changes going into the next version. Need to find some time to finish it.
Also, you might be interested on my newest plugin Media Tags. It lets you tag you uploaded media for filtering in the template.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/media-tags/
I only use Theme Switch and the Maintenance Mode Plugin when I design. WordPress Theme Demo another great plugin for showcasing your work.
waw.. thank a lot.. only some of the plugin i ever heard.. thank again.
@bogdan pop but sometime you need to use it for test or something like that.
WP-Custom: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-custom/
Raw HTML is a life saver, i imported a blogger blog with lots of embeds not your regular youtube, and it really does what it promises. Highly recommend it.
I am seeing many WP plugin posts lately but I think your post comes to be very helpful . I specially wish I knew about the user switch plugin and the demo plugin before, it would have saved me a lot of time. Thanks for sharing
Great post! Keep up the great work! Your posts are a real life saver and source of inspiration for new ideas and designs.
I’ve just finished my last WP blog and I must say most of these tools were very very useful! Thanks for the great post!
Mario / NeoSublime
Wow, great posts thank. I normally do all my development on my local server. There are some great tutorials on setting them up.
That’s really nice post, I was searching the Plugin Directory of Wordpress to improve my blog. here I find most of
Thanks
Maintenance Mode and Mini Forms – fantastic! I’m going to use them today. This is a really great list of plug-ins. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks. This is great for wordpress fans like myself.
I’m bookmarking this post and your blog right now!
Your posts are a real life saver and source of inspiration for new ideas and designs.
Awesome list of super useful resources, thanks for posting this.
WP sIFR and Sample WordPress Content look particularly useful.
nice, thank a lot
but for me some of the plugin very difficult to set up
it’s really great list of plug-ins, thx for sharing
Great advice. This has been my future goal in blogging…this post may have boosted my motivation. Thanks.
Hey Looks like U also changed the theme from the last time I visited. Yeah it was long ago.
One thing I would like to tell you is surely the plugins you listed are great for testing themes, but the major problem is that a quite a few of these are not officially supported in 2.7.1. till date. Some of them do work even though the themes are not officially supported but some don’t.
Infact a lot plugins are still not supported in WP 2.7.1. I could not install “Homepage Excerpts” plugin on my blog. Infact I did, but had to resinstall WP because the plugin broke it. It was my good luck that I was only starting that blog and it had no post.
So, don’t install “HOPMEPAGE EXCERPTS” on a 2.7.1. Its risky.
Thanks and i hope i will hang around more this time.
See ya.
Another great post, simple and understandable and the most important as great time saver..
Is it possible to use these by all and to develop the theme when that person is totally illiterate about coding.
No, it’s not possible to develop a theme when you’re totally illiterate about coding. The plugins will help to make some tasks in the development process easier, but they’re not magic.
realy nice useful plugins, thanks a lot..
Very good site. I will install it now in my wordpress site.
Thanks a lot.
Thanks for the list. Next, do a list on plugins for Plugin Development rather than Theme development.
Is there a plug-in which lets you specify the theme based on the category, so the look can change when the user clicks to navigate to a different category?
Andrew,
Not that I am aware of.
I like the idea of the maintenance plugin although I have not really used it. I have used the Theme Test Drive theme but I guess with the new release of WP, you can test it before you activate it. Kind of view pages and see how it would look like.
Thanks for the details, this will surely help theme designers
One of the frustrating things about theme development is the lack of built-in logging / debugging support. After getting annoyed with using ‘print_r’ statements from PHP to hone in on coding errors, I developed a plugin to display log messages to the Safari debug console or the Firefox firebug console.
http://www.turingtarpit.com/2009/05/wordpress-logger-a-plugin-to-display-php-log-messages-in-safari-and-firefox/
thanks for the wp plugin’s list … i think i will use WordPress Theme Demo Plugin for my blog … thanks again
thanks for you to share . it is so useful for us
but for me some of the plugin very difficult to set up
Thanks for the list.
Anyway, I use Wordpress Theme Demo Bar Plugin to preview theme. I think it has more features than the Theme Switch plugin.
In the latest version you can edit other theme’s option without activating it.
Cheers.
Nice list of pugins.How about advertising plugin?
hey it is really nice word press plugin to create theme.
It helps me a lot…
thanks a lot for post such a valuable information.
Hello mate
Those listed are a must have
Thznks for sharing them
Trackbacks