WordPress Theming for a live multisite

Question

I wanted to reach out and see if someone could point me in the right direction:

I have a multisite WordPress Installation that is live and functioning. I now want to start coding a theme for the live multisite, so that I can install the theme after I finish developing it locally.

The question is: what is the best approach to getting started?

• Should I get the entire root of the live installation and setup my local environment to emulate the live version of the multisite? => the problem with this is that the live version is baked in to wpengine and the config files seem to be attached to that framework.

  • Should I start with a fresh local install of WordPress and simply migrate it to the live multisite when its completely done? => This is assuming that it will not conflict with the live version multisite aspect.

Any help would be greatly appreciated fellas, thoughts?

Answer 1

You can consider using this plugin http://wpebooks.com/replicator/ to replicate and set up a "staging" site. I would then develop the theme on the staging site and not worry about messing up "production" / live content.