WordPress keeps evolving and getting better and better. The current production version is 2.5.1 and 2.6 beta 1 has been hot off the presses for a few days now, and I thought I’d take the time to remind folks how to run it locally so you can play.
I currently use XAMPP Lite 1.6.6a for running WordPress locally. For those wondering, locally means on your C: drive under Windows XP and Windows Vista for me. Read about it and how to install it at Running and Reviewing WordPress 2.5-beta1.
If you already have XAMPP Lite all you have to do is:
- Unzip WordPress 2.6 beta 1 under the folder C:\xampplite\htdocs\wordpress26
- Run XAMPP Control Panel Application and start the Apache Admin.
- Create a database called wordpress26
- Copy C:\xampplite\htdocs\wodpress26\wp-config-sample.php to wp-config.php
- Edit wp-config.php and change the database name to wordpress26 and the login to root with no password unless you configured things differently on your machine.
- That’s it!!
- Browse to http://localhost/wordpress26 and follow the prompts as usual. Let me know if you need help in the comments.
Don’t forget to visit WordPress lead developer’s blog article WordPress 2.6 Beta 1 to read about all the coolness.
In the meantime, here’s 14 Reasons why you’d want to run WordPress locally:
- You want to check out the new features and get ready to use them in the most productive way on your self-hosted WordPress blog.
- You want to stay up all night trying different WordPress themes out.
- You’re developing your own WordPress theme and you need a test environment.
- You want to dig deep into the guts of WordPress and find out what makes it tick.
- You’re developing the next most-downloaded plug-in for WordPress 2.6 and you need a test environment to do so.
- You don’t want to run beta software for your production WordPress environment.
- To see what Post Revisioning is all about. Look for it under the Advanced Options section while you’re editing a blog post. It’s keeps an audit trail of sorts on your blog post editing sessions. Pretty darn cool.
- A new and improved image editing dialog that offers lots of control over the images in your posts. Look for it by hovering your mouse over an inserted image.
- Theme previewing as seen on WordPress.com
- Built-in word counting in the post editor. Now you don’t have to copy your blog post into Word and use the word counter to see how many words you’ve written/wrote. Of course, if you do that kind of thing. Or if you didn’t know you could do that kind of thing.
- Drag-and-drop sortable galleries.
- Header image and color editor next to the Theme Editor. Pretty cool.
- Lots of bug fixes and performance enhancements for WordPress itself, TinyMCE, jQuery and the jQuery UI 1.5.
- Because you’re just dang cool and on the cutting edge.
Remember, it’s always better to be cool than functional. Just kidding of course.
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