Previewing & making changes before activating child theme

[wittycassiehere]

Hi all,

I'm planning a site revamp in the coming weeks using the Metro theme, but I need to be able to make (and view!) changes to the child theme before actually having it go live. As a novice, it'll likely take lots of tweaking, and I don't want my readers to be subjected to all the changes in the meantime. However, I notice that certain features of Genesis and the theme itself are only available on the Dashboard once you've activated the theme. For example: the background image can be changed through the dashboard, not by making any changes to the CSS. Any way around this?

Apologies if this is a painfully simple (or repeat) question, but I don't see it answered elsewhere. Thanks in advance!

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Cassie
[Witty Title Here]

[wittycassiehere]

I can't edit my original post, but adding a note to say I can, in fact, change the background image before the theme is made active. But why doesn't the preview of the site show the widgets I currently have installed? Will they disappear if I make Metro active?

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Cassie
[Witty Title Here]

[Susan]

A new child theme will over-write any widgets you currently have installed in your existing theme.

[wittycassiehere]

Thanks for clarifying, Susan. That does make sense it would be overridden since that's what a child theme does. Inconvenient, though, that the new theme will have to go live (and therefore be incomplete design-wise) before I can add those widgets again. I want the final product to go live all together, not piece by piece! Is there a workaround for this I'm not familiar with? Thanks again.

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Cassie
[Witty Title Here]

[Susan]

Cassie - you could always use a Maintenance plug-in while you tweak those kinds of changes:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-maintenance-mode/

[wittycassiehere]

Thanks, Susan! I'll use this.

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Cassie
[Witty Title Here]

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