When it comes to editing PHP files in WordPress,

there are two ways we can go about it.

It all depends on where and how we're running our WordPress site.

The two examples we'll look at here are locally editing files and

remotely editing files, or editing files live on a server.

We have two example sites here.

One, phpforwordpress.dev, I have running locally using software desktop server.

The other one, wptreehouse.com/toursofnature,

we have running on an actual, live server.

Let's take a look at how we would edit our local files first.

When we have a local server installed, it's likely that inside of our

applications folder we'll have a mamp or a xampp folder set up.

Inside of that folder, we'll eventually find a folder called htdocs or

publichtml or something similar to that.

It depends on what type server configuration you have set up, and

we have several videos on Treehouse about setting up local environments for

running WordPress.

Once you figure out where your local server folder is, you could find your site

and then navigate in and find all of the local WordPress files.

And let's say we were going to make some edits to our theme file here.

We're running a child theme, and let's say we wanted to make edits to our header.php.

What we would need to do is open this up inside of a code editor.

For this example, we're using Sublime Text 2,

which is a great environment for working with WordPress.

Once we open up this file, we should see all of the code here and

we could come in and make our changes.

Let's just add in some test code here to see if our changes take effect.

Once we click save, we should be able to come over,

view our site again, refresh it, and see that these changes take place.

One of the great things about coding locally

is that you can undo mistakes if you make them.

Let's go ahead and close this now and

look at how we would make a similar change on a live site.

When it comes to editing live sites,

there's two ways we can go about making these changes to php files.

Both of them require FTPing in to our site.

Once we have used ftp software, like CyberDuck, for example,

to connect to our site, we can come in, find the file that we want to change.

And then do one of two things.

We could edit it directly from the server,

where we will edit the file,

make the changes that we want, save them, and

come back and refresh our site, and see those changes.

Or, we could download this file to our computer.

And then find that file locally, make the changes that we want.

However, when we refresh our site, we will see that those changes have not yet

been applied.

The reason is, we then need to go and

re-upload that new file that we just changed back to our server.

We'll overwrite the existing file.

And then we should see the changes made.

The first approach is often referred to live editing or cowboy coding and

can be a little bit dangerous, because once the change is made on the server,

you might not have an option to undo it.

Making a backup of the file and

making the changes locally, and then pushing it live, is a little bit safer.

Let's go back to our local file, remove the code we added,

save it, and then re-upload our file again.

Seeing that the changes are made.

This is a little bit safer.

However, the best way to go about it is to have a local copy of your site running

on a local server so you can download the whole site, make the changes locally,

test and make sure that everything works, and then re-upload your content.

I encourage you to check out on our local development or

WordPress workflow courses for more information about how to do this.

However, we're going to go on from here now that we've looked at how to edit

PHP files, and start looking at how to code some basic PHP.