3 Tools For Working With WordPress Offline
When you are developing a WordPress powered site, sometimes it is just not practical to put your designs online. The reasons could be:
You don’t want people snooping- You don’t want to mess with password protection and extra steps that may slow down your development process
- You are on limited bandwidth. Could be your ISP limits your transfer or you are running out of transfer for your web hosting account – remember every time you save you use up some transfer.
- You want to be mobile
- You want to get offline to focus on your work <- my favorite reason
Whatever your motivations are, the good news is you can very easily develop a site entirely offline before you put it online and make it live. We have been teaching students at Blog Theme Bootcamp how to do that for a long time. We call it the Sandbox. It isn’t all difficult you just need to set up your workspace and because PHP runs on a web server with PHP installed you will need to install a web server onto your computer. Yes, it can be done and don’t be intimidated by the sound of it. Also, just because you run a web server on your own computer does not automatically mean everyone online can access your computer.
The following are three tools that let you get a web server running on your computer quickly, with very little technical legwork (compared to the old method).
- Uniform Server – this is the one we use and have been using for a long time. We like its simplicity, but we also know from Blog Theme Bootcamp students people tend to run into port problems with it especially if you have Skype.
- WampServer – other students have found more success running WAMP. It is also very easy to get set up and running and has been around for a while.
- MAMP – this is for the Mac users among us. I have not had the opportunity to run it since we don’t develop on our Mac but people have reported success with it.
Once you get these installed, then all you need to do is copy WordPress into the right folder (in Uniserver it is the www folder), start your server, set up a database and navigate to WordPress from your browser it will install like it does on your web host and you can edit/modify/work on WordPress offline to your heart’s desire.
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Too weird…I am doing BTB # 26 about the author.php page. On Uniserver the author page literally disappears if you click on an auther name. I even installed YOUR complete set of files from #26 and same thing happened. But if I setup on my web based account it works fine! ??
Hi Lorian,
Someone (not a Blog theme bootcamp student) once asked for help on a
similar problem regarding their about page. Now that you report this I
have a feeling this is nothing to do with your coding but perhaps it
points to a server setting. I have yet to find a solution yet. For
now, just be aware that just because a site is the exact replica of
another it can behave quite differently between different servers.
can i use worpdress on wamp and attach there database to my hosting account.?
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘attaching’ the database to your hosting account. If you are asking if you can have WordPress on one server (on your computer) and set the database to connect to the one on your web host. Technically yes. But you must allow third party connections on your web host side. You must also set up your own computer and network to be able to communicate to outside servers. This is perhaps the trickiest part of all. Overall, it is something I’d only recommend if you’re pretty technical.