I’m about to buy my first professional theme, but don’t want to disturb my current blog while I’m messing about with the new one. Can I do this, and preview my experimenting with my new theme without loading it and making it public before it’s ready? How would I go about this?
Thanks!
Yes. Install Ghost locally, get the theme working there, then upload it to your live site when you’re happy with it.
If you have Windows, I recommend using WSL for local development – there have been things that were buggy with Windows, and using WSL makes those problems go away.
Alternately, pikapods is like $2/month, so if setting up a whole dev environment feels like too much, that’s a pretty good alternative. You’ll spend more time zipping and uploading to see your changes than you would running locally, but it’ll get you up and editing faster.
Thank you! Next question: can I export my current content from my live blog to my dev blog with the new theme (only a few posts) or do I need to upload existing content from scratch?