Step 4: Develop Locally

Studio provides convenient quick-access buttons for opening your site, plugin, and theme code directly in popular code editors like Visual Studio Code and PhpStorm.

As you develop, you’ll see any file changes within the folder where you initialized a local repository appear in the “changed files” area within GitHub Desktop.

Depending on your workflow, you may decide to commit your changes to different branches that you merge into your main branch. If you’ve been working on the main branch, and you decide to create a new branch, be sure to click the “Bring my changes to new-branch-name” option before clicking the “Switch Branch” button.

Once you’re on the correct branch:

1. Give your commit a summary, and then click the “Commit to new-branch name” button.
2. Click “Publish Branch“.
3. Click the Preview Pull Request button, and then the Create Pull Request button.
4. Once you’re taken to GitHub in your browser, click the Create Pull Request button. It’s here that you can set up rulesets, actions, and/or apps to run prior to being able to merge any code into your main branch. You may also invite contributors, request code reviewers, and categorize the change.
5. Once you’re ready to merge the pull request to your main branch, click the Merge pull request button, and then Confirm merge button.

As a best practice and to keep your repository tidy, delete the branch by clicking the Delete branch button.

After merging your changes, the next step is to deploy them to your WordPress.com production or staging site using the GitHub Deployments feature.