If you have a blog powered by WordPress, don’t you wish that sometimes you could play around with the layout? Or maybe test some plugins somewhere just to make sure they would be fine before you put them up on your blog. Maybe you’re a problogger wannabe and you would like to improve your blogging skills, including those theme hacks. There’s actually a somehow easy way to do that: install WordPress on your computer!
Well, it isn’t that easy nor is it that difficult. But there are some things that you need before you install WordPress on your blog. What are they? Here’s a short list:
Apache
PHP
MySQL
WordPress
Whether you are using Windows or Linux, you could install these things. Actually, there’s an easy way to install Apache, PHP and MySQL. It is via the XAMPP package from Apache Friends. Just follow the instructions on the site and you should be ready to go install WordPress after that.
For Linux users: http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-linux.html
For Windows users: http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-windows.html
For Mac users: http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-macosx.html
You can download WordPress from their download page. Then unzip it in a folder where you could ‘hack’ on it. It should be in the folder you could access your httpdocs so that you could view them properly. On my personal setup, it’s in /opt/lamp/htdocs/wordpress. Unzip or unpack the files in that directory.
Once you have everything set up already, run XAMPP and open your webbrowser to your PhpMyAdmin page. From there, create a database on MySQL. Note the information like the database name for your WordPress blog, your username and password. You will have to edit the wp-config-sample.php to include those things.
When you already edited your wp-config-sample.php, rename it as wp-config.php. Then open your broser or a new tab to run the install.php of WordPress. Make sure that the path is complete on your browser. It would install WordPress quickly. It’s the famous 5 minute install. Or less.
Once you have everything sert up, you could start on making some hacks on your WordPress theme and even test some plugins and widgets. For that, you would have to wait a little bit.
Originally posted on September 13, 2006 @ 1:46 pm
