One of the core features of Themer Pro is the Child Theme Editor. What makes it so foundational is that it provides such a powerful development environment right inside your dashboard that you can focus more on your development and less on messing with FTP or staging sites or whatever else you may have otherwise required when no such WP IDE was available. And that’s not to say that the Themer Pro theme editor is meant to completely replace all of the developer’s favorite coding tools, but simply that it greatly enhances the development process inside of WordPress and may even allow for the reduction of some of such dev tools.
At the core of the Themer Pro theme editor is the Ace Editor code editor script. This library of code editing goodness provides the Themer Pro Plugin, and ultimately the freelance developer, with a robust set of coding tools that closely resemble the experience you might have with your favorite code editing tool installed on your computer. From custom search, find ‘n replace, line numbering, syntax highlighting, and a whole lot more, Ace Editor is really an amazing piece of software to have powering your Plugins file management functionality.
A few things to note about the Child Theme editor:
- All edits are made directly. This means that when you edit and save changes to a particular file you are actually manipulating that file. So there is no database interaction or anything like that. Just direct file editing. This is ideal for the greatest usefulness to the freelance developer because it allows them to activate Themer Pro, make their changes, and then deactivate the Plugin whenever they want, without having to worry about losing customizations or anything like that. Also, this means that you can edit the same Child Theme files with your favorite code editor anytime you like and there will be no conflict with Themer Pro.
- The Themer Pro theme editor provides some failsafe features to help prevent broken code from temporarily breaking your site, but it’s still always possible. In other words, let’s say you created a new function in your Child Theme’s functions.php file that had the same name as another function somewhere else in your theme. This would throw and error on your site and require you to re-edit that file to fix it, using something like FTP to access the file outside of the WordPress environment. So just be careful when editing certain files and even better is to have a kind of “frontend functions” file that can only break the frontend so you can always fix it on the backend and get back up and running more quickly. Note that solution for these kinds of potential issues are provided throughout these docs, and some are mentioned in the related article links below.
- Sometimes the syntax validation checking provided by the Themer Pro editor doesn’t recognize your code as valid and will prevent you from saving. In such cases you can just turn off the syntax validation checking through your Themer Pro settings and then you’ll be able to save anything you want. In most cases this is a non-issue, and in many cases there’s a good reason Themer Pro won’t save your code (so first check to make sure you code is in fact valid and not broken in some way), but in case you run into a snag with this I just wanted to mention the simple solution.
- The search/find/replace feature is very useful for not only finding specific code snippets, but replacing multiple strings of text at once. You can bring this up with CTRL (win) or CMD (mac) + “f”.
- Customizing the editor’s syntax coloring and design is as easy as changing Ace Editor Themes through your Themer Pro settings. And going full screen just requires either a click of the icon at the top-right of the editor, or simply pressing CTRL (win) or CMD (mac) + “e”.
- On any given file you can easily copy all of its code by clicking the “Copy Code” button at the top-right of the editor. This is especially useful when duplicating the contents of a file (maybe a page template or something like that) to be pasted into a newly named file for further editing.
There are many other bits I could mentioned, but more can be found on this excellent Themer Pro feature by browsing the related article links below.
