An essential for any aspiring theme developer is a local install of WordPress. There are plenty of benefits to doing so and there are also pitfalls if you don’t. I will tell you about the pitfalls in a second, but before that, I want to tell you 5 great reasons why you should use a local install as your sandbox as opposed to installing a live version on some subdomain of yours:
- Works exactly like the real deal; plugins and all
- No need to mess with FTP programs
- Develop anywhere (no connection needed)
- Make sure your theme is compatible with latest version of WordPress
- Code in secret, then release with a bang
I can personally attest that the last reason is a good one. While working on the current theme for this website, I accidentally pinged Technorati, which notified a bunch of people of my latest work. When this site finally got released, it was more of a fizzle instead of a bang. Anyhow, let’s get on to the tutorial.
Install WordPress Locally
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Download and Extract XAMPP Lite
- Go to http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-windows.html#646
- Download XAMPP Lite.exe (the .exe is a smaller, faster download)
- Move the download to the root of your C drive C:\
- Run the .exe and the directory will be installed
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Startup Apache and MySQL
- Open the xampplite folder
- Double click setup_xampp.bat
- After the program tells you to have fun, press any key on your keyboard
- Now double click on xampp-control.exe
- Now start the Apache and MySQL services
- If everything worked, you will see Running next to those 2 services
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Create a New Database
- In your browser of choice, navigate to http://localhost/xampp/splash.php
- Click on your language
- On the left hand side, under Tools, click phpMyAdmin
- On that page, you will see the MySQL heading, like in the screenshot below
- Call the database wordpress and select utf8 unicode ci from the drop down menu
- Click Create
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Install WordPress
- Download and extract WordPress to your desktop
- In the extracted folder, open the file wp-config-sample.php in a text editor
- Edit the file to look like this:
define('DB_NAME', 'wordpress'); // The name of the database
define('DB_USER', 'root'); // Your MySQL username
define('DB_PASSWORD', ''); // ...and password
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost'); // 99% chance you won't need to change this value - Save the file as wp-config.php
- Now open up the Xammplite folder on your C drive and then open the htdocs folder
- Copy the whole Wordpress folder here
- Finally, use your browser and navigate to http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php
Its easy to install it. Even on a server, it’s not difficult.
Well I was browsing the internet today and I entirely freaked out. I absolutely found my ex-girlfriend pictures on the internet. I have no idea when she did this but my ex-girlfriend was making at liberty with some other teen.
Does anyone be struck by any info on this ex-girlfriend site?
Thanks david.. it’s really help me a lot..
Thanks David, it saved me a lot of time since I am a newbie to WP.
I am going to try this install this weekend! I would love to be able to tweak everything before I use up loads of bandwidth refreshing
I’ve just installed WP 2.9.1 locally with XAMPP Windows 1.7.3 in my Vista PC.
How To Install WordPress Locally With XAMPP
i love that people like you share your newbie helping info with people like me. thankyou!
Thanks for the article….
If anyone is running IIS, you need to change the port on IIS to 8080 for this to run, and turn off skype, it runs on port 80 also.
Great tips!! So I can edit wordpress themes on my computer itself!
Wrodpress theme install on window? What is the advantage of it?
i installed wordpress on server machine which is a win XP PC, in the same way u explined in the procedure.. and it got installed wery well.
but my problem s i cudn’t access the login page from any other pc’s which are connected on LAN..my idea is to develope a intranet blog which can be seen and updated by any other computers on the local intranet(LAN)..so plz give me step by step procedure to make this work…
Thanks for sharing useful software.
Can we install also in blogs?
I am going to try this install this weekend! I would love to be able to tweak everything before I use up loads of bandwidth refreshing
Now wordpress is 3.0, i am so happy to check the new features.
This is just the info I needed. Thanks to you!
Thanks for the tips. This would be great for a staging server. Let’s you try out themes and features. Just make sure you’ve got high bandwidth connection if you want others to access your new home-managed wordpress blog.
I found this to work great for development of our fitness store. We wanted to change the entire look of it and make sure all the weight training equipment and products viewed correctly before re-launching. This write-up worked amazingly well!
So once you do and I think that is very easy. thanks for these tips.
Very nice and informative post, clearly explaining everything about the theme and customization options of the website
information like this are very useful on the Internet
Nice information, I really appreciate the way you presented.Thanks for sharing..
Thank you. Tired of Typepad failing and getting ready to migrate to Wordpress. Wanted to start building themes anyway. Very helpful.