There are thousands of Plug-ins for WordPress out there, some are really useful, some are funny and some are totally useless. I came  across a very useful one the other day while passing some time browsing, it is called Theme Test Drive by Vladimir Prelovac. Now I am struggling at the moment  with a theme that I am comfortable with and that I think looks good. At present I am using the Photocrati Theme 4.07, by Photocrati, I have been happy with this theme for ages, but from all of the templates it comes with there is not a clean, minimalistic template, however the Photocrati photo gallery is a really nice bit of kit!

I started to look around for a more suitable theme for my needs and found the Thesis theme, which I read up on, watched the videos and eventually purchased and downloaded. It is very user friendly and very easy to customize, but it does not have a decent gallery setting to show my portfolio. I was torn between the two of them, but for the moment I am sticking with Photocrati until I get my head around Thesis.

The plug-in I found not only showed me what the theme looked like, but I can change everything without effecting my installed theme. I can write posts,  pages, activate Plug-ins, move widgets about etc. The great thing is while I am doing this, people visiting my blog are oblivious to the frustration and hair pulling that the author is going through trying to work out how to set up the new theme. Theme Test Drive allows you to do anything with your potential new theme without altering your installed theme in anyway, very impressive I think. Once you are happy with your new theme and are confident with the controls and design features, you can then make the jump over to it.

To sum up all the waffle I have written above: Theme Test Drive WordPress Plug-in allows you to safely test drive any theme on your blog as administrator, while visitors still use the default one. Once downloaded and installed the Plug-in can be accessed on the appearance tab on the left hand side the WordPress screen.

Once activated a settings page appears allowing you to select the theme which you want to test drive. You can specify the level of users to have access to the selected theme preview. By default it is set to 10 (admin only). Level 7 are editors, level 4 are authors and level 1 are contributors. Once this is done just click on ‘Enable Theme Drive’ and then you can test your potential theme to your heart’s content without damaging you blog.

You can also preview any theme by adding “?theme=xxx” to your blog URL. For example  http://www.mybog.com/?theme=Default

If you want to  download Theme Test Drive then please visit this LINK.

If you are reading this and can recommend a nice clean crisp theme that has good photo manipulation and decent gallery setting then please fell free and let me know Thanks!