I recently spent some time developing a WordPress theme for this blog. On the one hand, I needed a local environment for development and testing, in order to avoid frequent remote server updates. On the other hand, as understanding and wading through all the WordPress php template files can be overwhelming—especially the first time—, navigating and accessing the framework code was an issue, as well.
Luckily, there are tools out there that, once together, make the development less tedious and much more productive.

Here are the pieces I pulled together as my “WordPress theme development” environment:

Just click the above pictures to get to the related sites. Here are the big points that those tools brought to my theme development process.

Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop come handy for theme design structure and layout, using layers, (smart) guides, and grids; and also for exporting consistent graphical assets, because colors—especially in gradients—may look different when mixing formats and tools.

XAMPP is an Apache web server with MySQL, PHP and Perl, all in one easy to install package. It’s free and it runs on all platforms. Once installed, I could install and run a dummy WordPress site for quickly testing my theme locally. It comes with an interface for turning individual services on and off.

Zend.com has developed the free PDT plugin for PHP development in eclipse, which also runs on all platforms. The all-in-one PDT install is a quick way to avoid identifying which thrid-party plugins are required, in case you just want to install the plugin in an existing eclipse environment. PDT was the biggest time saver, as it provides code completion (for PHP and CSS code), quick resource opening, selected term definition opening, debugging, and live page preview in the same integrated environment.

The WordPress documentation for theme development is a great source of important information. Perusing the code from other themes is, of course, enlightening, too. The CSS master class from richinstyle.com was also a lifesaver for writing robust cross-browser styles.

How many times do you need to measure if spacings or sizes match the intended design? When you develop a theme: always! The xScope app just does that better than anything else. Check it out! Only for Mac OS X users, though.