Text Editors

Throughout this book, we provide instructions for customizing your blog by modifying theme files. Although WordPress's built-in theme editor enables you to edit files via a WordPress administration panel interface, using a text editor on your computer offers a great deal more flexibility and power.

There are two ways to modify your blog's theme files with a text editor:

• Use FTP software to download the file to your computer, edit the file and save changes with a text editor, and upload it to the server via FTP, thus overwriting the original file. Appendix B explains how to use FTP.
  
  
• Use a text editor with built-in FTP capabilities to open the file directly from the server, edit it, and save changes directly to the server. This technique makes editing a file on the server as easy as working with a file on your own computer.
  
  

In this appendix, we provide basic instructions for setting up and using two popular text editor programs, each of which includes built-in FTP capabilities: Chami.com's HTML-Kit for Windows and Bare Bones Software's TextWrangler for Mac OS.

Tips

• It's a good idea to back up a file before editing it. Then, if your edits mess up the file, you can simply replace the bad file with a known working copy.

• Do not use a word processing application such as Microsoft Word to edit theme files. Doing so may introduce additional characters that could cause errors in your edited files.