Have you wondered what makes WordPress development so powerful? It is nothing but WordPress themes, which help in creating unique websites. Themes allow quick changes of the visual design and layout of a WordPress site. WordPress developers can help you get the website or blog that you have always dreamed off using these theme development tools. No wonder some of biggest of Fortune 500 companies are using WordPress to manage their official blogs.

You can easily create custom theme using these theme development tools. If that sounds a bit tough, you can outsource your WordPress project to offshore development centers, which will do your job in a professional yet cost effective manner. In this article, we shall discuss a few theme development tools used in WordPress.

Development Tools That You Need

Local Server - Your desktop/laptop is the best place for custom development of WordPress themes. You will need to turn your computer into a local server and create a virtual web server (Apache, MySQL and PHP), which can easily be done by installing WordPress into your computer. You will not need to install these server separately and will be able to do that using the XAMP (for Windows) and MAMP (for Macintosh).

WordPress – Although this might seem too obvious, you will need to download and install the latest version of WordPress into your workstation. This needs to be installed into your local test server from where you will be testing your theme. The installation procedure of XAMP and MAMP in your local test server is a bit different and you need to take care of that.

Dummy Content –You will need dummy content to create a theme.  Go to the admin panel of WordPress and navigate to Tools > Import and choose WordPress from the list of options of WXR post data file. You can choose among The Theme Development Checklist test data, The Sandbox Dummy Content or WPCandy Sample Content.

Text Editor – Most developers prefer to use special graphics software for creating WordPress themes. You can try Notepad or Notepad++ if you are developing on Windows while Mac users can try Smultron.

Browser – You can use any browser for WordPress development but Mozilla Firefox is the most recommended one. The add-ons, which make Firefox the most, preferred choice of WordPress developers around the world. The Web Developer toolbar, which gives you a whole host of options for inspecting and debugging your code, and Firebug, which lets you, inspect each element in your theme right up till the code.

PHP – This is also commonly used in WordPress theme development. The default WordPress theme contains a functions.php file that defines many of features of the theme. Good WordPress developers use this to modify and create their custom themes.

Having these tools at hand will allow you to develop custom themes in WordPress. For more information on WordPress Theme development and associated costs involved, visit http://www.evontech.com/wordpress-development.html now!