Building a WordPress Theme Toolbox - Software

Over the past couple of years I've collected a series of programs, plug-ins and bookmarks that make up my WordPress Toolbox. While the bookmarks mostly act as reference material the plug-ins and programs are essential to developing a working WordPress theme and getting a new WordPress installation up and running.As a start to the WordPress Theme Building Project I thought I'd share all the things that make up my WordPress Toolbox starting with the Software. In later posts we'll cover some helpful extensions as well as some helpful websites and references as well.

All the programs mentioned in this post are available for free. I've provided links to them all as well as a quick commentary to explain their usefulness. If there's anything you currently use that you'd like to recommend please feel free to share.

Browsers

The only piece of commercial software I recommend having is your own OS' browser. I've found that most designers and bloggers have already started using either Firefox or Opera and that's great. The problem arises with the slew of Average Joes who still rely on Internet Explorer to browse the web.

One unfortunate truth about web design is that proper code doesn't always appear properly on all browsers. IE 6 is notorious for mixing up standards and rendering things the wrong way. Since you want your theme to appeal to as many people as possible you're going to want to make sure you stick as closely to the standards as possible but you'll also want to keep an eye on how IE will display things. Even IE 7 has some issues with rendering - it's better but not best.

Besides IE or Safari you should also grab either Firefox, Opera or both. They're free so it doesn't hurt to have access to them to confirm you're site is working in the most popular browsers.

Just as a quick note for Windows users: Safari is available in a Public Beta test for Windows Machines. Unfortunately I don't know much about it's standard compliance but having access to it might be insightful.

Text Editors

The next thing you're going to want to get is a decent text editor. WordPad and Notepad won't do and a word processor like Works or Word is straight out.

I recommend the open source program NotePad++ for all new WordPress designers mostly because of the color coding system that's built into the application. Once a file is saved with the right extension all the code is color coded to match properly. Besides making it easier to distinguish between different parts of the code it also helps with trouble shooting. Once you know what the color coding should be you will quickly recognize when something is wrong. This is a huge time saver!

Any Text Editor will do just be sure not to use WordPad or Notepad because they tend to add some extra stuff (most of it invisible to everyone but a computer) that will screw things up in the long run.

FTP Apps

If you're using XP hands down you want to grab Novell's NetDrive. I have yet to find an easier way to mount an FTP server!

Just enter the site's information and click the connect button. Once that's done you'll have a new drive added to your My Computer Screen that represents the FTP server. You can now edit all your files as though they were on your local machine. It's really that simple!

If you're using Vista you're kind of at Microsoft's mercy. I can't get my system to connect properly to my FTP server and every FTP client I've tried fails miserably - every one except CrossFTP. Maybe it's because CrossFTP is Java, I don't know. The fact is Vista doesn't play nice with FTP so try out your options and see what works best. It's imperative to have a good FTP App though.

Image Editors

One last piece of software I recommend having is a decent image editor. While you can get away with using something like Paint in the long run you'll find programs like Paint.NET and GIMP are much more versatile even to the unskilled novice. I still can barely accomplish anything meaningful with these programs but they're great for creating color swatches as references when working on a theme.

Having a decent image editor will also come in extremely handy when you're actually posting. I regularly mashup images and resize things (like some of the images in this post) and my personal choice, GIMP, is essential for doing that quickly.