Wordpress

Matthew McGarity (aka., @SpamBoy) gave an excellent talk at WordCamp Dallas 2009 on performing local installs of WordPress. One reason you might want to run a locally installed version of your WordPress blog is that you can make changes to a copy of your blog before you roll those same changes out to your production WordPress installation.

Here are a few key points from his presentation:

• Local WordPress installs are good for testing new plugins, themes, or custom WordPress features.
• You can test bleeding edge versions of WordPress.
• You have a local mirror copy of your blog.

There are a good number of technical bits to setting up a local install of your WordPress blog depending if you are running a Windows, Mac, or Linux machine so I won’t go through everything here that was covered in the session. However, SpamBoy did mentioned that we should be able to download his presentation, so I will put a link to that presentation here once it’s available.

I will say that I’ve installed WordPress locally before and it isn’t something that I would want to maintain unless I was in a situation where I needed to access a development environment and I wasn’t going to have access to the Internet.

What I normally do is just install WordPress on a sub folder of an existing domain so I can leverage the speed and simplicity of using Fantastico that is provided by my hosting provider to create a WordPress install with just a few clicks. I’m not saying that this will get me an environment where I can get crazy with the customizations, but for most bloggers, this method of creating a development environment will work just fine.

In a future article I will cover how to export your WordPress content using the built-in WordPress export tool and then we’ll look at how to import that exported data into another WordPress installation. This is a quick and basic way of making a copy of your blog, including content, comments, and images.

Let me know if you are interested in creating a local install of WordPress and I will make sure you get a copy of the material.

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com