i am a new user who hasn’t uploaded anything here yet. i am planning to upload my WordPress theme here that i am currently developing but i am wondering how does the live preview works? like when ones click on the live preview button of any wordpress theme here they are directed towards a homepage which has different layouts in card styling of that same theme and clicking on each card will show you that layout of the theme. some themes even have settings in there live preview that you can use to change the the design and look of there wp themes. now my question is how to accomplish that? the only idea i have in mind on how to accomplish that manually is that do i have to buy a domain and hosting for my theme and then install WordPress in many subdomains there and each WordPress installation will hold my theme in different layouts while the main domain will have screenshot in cards of all those different layouts of my theme and clicking on it will direct you to that layout. but all that seems kinda extra work so does themeforest provides some kinda tool to help build your live preview? seeing the url of the live preview of different themes , it seems like live previews is hosted at a subdomain of themeforest as its http://preview.themeforest.net/… Please can somebody help me understand how does live preview at themeforest works for wordpress themes in detail? sorry i know its not that … great of a question but i researched online and there is no info on how live preview works at themeforest
You need your own domain and hosting - Envato do not host the demos (remove the Themeforest preview bar and you will see they all sit on a separate domain)
To give yourself a decent chance I would avoid free hosting (likely errors, downtime, poor customer experience etc.).code
so i was right about the manually building this live preview and then hosting it on a server? thats a lot of work doesn’t it? its like envato tries to make this as much difficult for there authors as they can. also my theme can get rejected if i used a not so decent hosting i.e the free ones for the live preview of my theme?
It’s hardly a big ask for a premium marketplace and professional developers. With respect if you see this as a bit of a chore then you are probably in the wrong place to be selling items - it’s not a simple as building an item and leaving it You will need to consider support updates etc.
Imagine the fees involved for envato to host the tens of thousands of items for sale.
It’s unlikely that a theme would be rejected for using cheap hosting but it does not do you any favours in terms of marketing your item etc. Even the big names like GoDaddy, Blue, Siteground etc. are not that expensive and better than freebies.
yeah you are right i need a team i thought i could do this alone and i can but its too much work for one person. Thank you again for guiding me, appreciate the help. also one last thing is it common here for WordPress developers to develop themes single-handedly?
There are plenty of people who are solo devs.
The big players obviously have support teams but that’s a fairly long way off before you need to worry too much about that.
Thank you @charlie4282 for the help, i think i will continue on developing the theme myself for now, again appreciate all the help
You can definitely do it alone, most of the authors here (me included) are one man show. But of course it is a lot of work when you just starting out. Nobody said it is supposed to be easy.
Thank you so much for all the support. the support at this community is amazing, in fact you guys are amazing. really i appreciate that a lot