TUTS+ tutorial totally confusing, no support

Hi @styzer,

Thanks for taking the Underscores course! Hopefully I can help clarify why it takes you along the path it does.

When you create custom themes with Underscores, (or most any other method), you do need to work offline in order for the process to be practical, for a few reasons:

• You'll need to make lots of edits to files in a good code editor like Sublime Text and as such you need those files to be offline.
• If you were using an online WP installation you'd have to re-upload your theme files every time you made a change which would be painful and very slow.
• On top of the above, Underscores uses the Sass / SCSS preprocessing language instead of CSS. This means you need to edit .scss files and compile them into CSS, which we do with Prepros in the course. This extra step before you could manually upload your theme files would make attempting to do your development online even more painful.

Basically making changes to themes online is only suitable if:

• You are making small code edits, not significant changes
• You are using some type of WYSIWYG theme creation system

Please note I did actually mention you'd be setting up an offline WordPress development site towards the end of the second free video.

You definitely do want to be working offline. Re. Bitnami, you can use another offline installation method if you prefer but in my experience the others are more complex. You can also use another method of compiling SCSS instead of Prepros if you prefer, but with this also in my experience other options are more complex.

Re. Jetpack, I didn't have to do this at the time of recording so I assume something must have changed, but it looks like you can enable development / offline mode by following the instructions here: http://ift.tt/1S2jxvk

Re. what the prerequisites are, as I described in the second free video you should be comfortable with CSS (i.e. experienced rather than being a beginner) and ideally have a foundation in SCSS. If you're at that level you should be good to go.

If you feel you're not at that level, please do let us know and I'm sure we can find another way to help you out.

Thanks!

Kezz

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