Skills are one thing, but the better your tools are, and the more command you have over those tools, the better your skills can be put to use. Just ask any carpenter, golfer, or app programmer about the sheer importance of their favorite "tools of the trade", you're likely to get quite an earful.
In order to get started in the next chapter, you'll need the following tools to help you out:
You'll need a good HTML editor. Text editors which a lot of web developers trust include:
- Dreamweaver (http://www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver/)
- Coda for Mac (http://www.panic.com/coda/)
- TextWrangler (http://www.barebones. com/products/textwrangler/)
- HTML-kit (http://www.htmlkit.com/)
An HTML or text editor that includes the following features will work just great:
- View line numbers: Can help you find specific lines in a theme file, to help you identify any problems
- View syntax colors: Helps you identify where you're working in PHP, HTML, CSS, and where the code is working
- View nonprinting characters: Helps you see hard returns, spaces, tabs, and other special characters that you may or may not want in your code
- Text wrapping: Lets you wrap text, so you don't have to scroll horizontally to edit a long line of code
- Load files with FTP or local directories: Lets you work on remote files (or upload local files to a remote server) from your code editor
Tip
Free open source HTML editors
Free, open source text editors include:
- Nvu (http://www.net2.com/nvu/)
- KompoZer (http://kompozer.net/)
- Bluefish (http://bluefish.openoffice.nl)
The next piece of software you'll need is a graphics editor. While you can find plenty of CSS-only WordPress themes out there (and CSS3 gives you much more opportunity to create graphic effects with code), chances are that you'll want to expand on your design a little more and add nice visual enhancements.
The most popular graphics programs are Photoshop (or its lighter cousin, Photoshop Elements) and Fireworks, both from Adobe (http://www.adobe.com/products/).
If you're looking for a free, open source graphics program, you could try one of the following:
- GIMP (http://gimp.org/)
- Inkscape (http://inkscape.org).
Finally, you'll need a web browser. Many developers use Firefox, available at http://mozilla.com/firefox/. It includes some advanced developer tools which are useful for debugging and delving into your code. If you're getting started though, you might find Google Chrome easier to use at first. It's fast and standards-compliant and available at https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/.
You'll also need to use other web browsers to test your theme on, as it will need to be compatible with the latest versions of the main browsers. Browsers you should be testing on include:
- Firefox
- Chrome
- Safari for Mac
- Opera
- Internet Explorer (Version 7 or 8 upwards)
It's unlikely that you'll have access to all of these browsers on your machine—Internet Explorer only runs on Windows and Safari only runs on a Mac, for example. To test them, you can use the AdobeBrowser lab tool, available at http://browserlab.adobe.com.