There may be times when we want to make changes to our blogs, to test a new plugin or theme, and we don’t want to do this on our live site. What we can do is install a local copy of WordPress on our PC for development. This is a step by step on how to do that. We will be installing WAMP5 - a software package that will allow us to run Apache, PHP5 and MySQL on our PC. This is extremely simple to do and will only take 10 minutes.

1. Download and install WAMP5 into C:\wamp. It is ok to use the default settings for the rest of the installation.

2. Left click the WAMP5 System Tray icon and select Put Online.

startwamp_1.jpg

3. Open your browser and go to http://localhost. You should see the WAMP5 homepage.

4. Now that your web server is up and running, let’s create the WordPress database. On the WAMP5 home page, click the PHPmyadmin link.

choosephpmyadmin.jpg

5. Enter wordpress in the “Create New Database” Field, and select utf8_unicode_ci in the drop down box in the next field, as shown below. Click on Create.

createdb.jpg

6. Download WordPress and unzip it into C:\wamp\www. Note: If you are doing development for your live blog, it’s recommended that you install the same version of WordPress locally that you run online. Older versions of WordPress can be found in the WordPress Release Archives. You may have to check with your hosting company to find out which version is installed.

7. You now have a WordPress folder under C:\wamp\www. Browse to that folder and open wp-config-sample.php in a text editor. Replace the default values with these:

// ** MySQL settings ** //
define(’DB_NAME’, ‘wordpress’); // The name of the database
define(’DB_USER’, ‘root’); // Your MySQL username
define(’DB_PASSWORD’, ”); // …and password BLANK!
define(’DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’); // 99% chance you won’t need to change this value

8. Save the file as wp-config.php.

9. Open your browser and navigate to http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php and follow the instructions.

Your done! You now have a local copy of WordPress running on your computer. You can now hack away without the worry of breaking anything on your live site.

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