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When developing websites or wordpress themes i always use xampp as it makes life so much easier. Basically the program allows you to use your computer as a server, saving you time & bandwith uploading to servers online. Firstly your going to need xampp and a fresh copy of wordpress, you can get wordpress from wordpress.org and xampp from apachefriends.org. Once you’ve downloaded both, extract wordpress to a folder on your desktop and install xampp. After xampp has installed open up your hard drive and locate the xampp folder, inside the xampp folder there should be a folder called “htdocs”.

The “htdocs” folder is where you’ll place your wordpress installation, website ,script etc… Copy your wordpress folder into the htdocs folder make sure the wordpress folder aint a wordpress folder within a wordpress folder. The contents of the wordpress folder should be on the next level. Open your wordpress folder and rename the file “wp-config-sample.php” to “wp-config.php”. Open the “wp-config.php” file you should be greeted with some PHP, the only chunk of code you need to edit are listed on the image below.

You need to enter a database name, username and password. Make sure you remember them, save your file then start up xampp, when you load xampp you’ll be greeted with a box like this.

The only two functions you need running are the first two. “apache & mysql”, press start on the two services. Your computer is now running as a server using the “htdocs” folder as your main server directory. Open your web browser and type “http://localhost”.

You should get a big orange website come up called xampp, in the sidebar under tools click “phpmyadmin”. In phpmyadmin you need to create a new database, the database has to be the same as what ever you put in your wordpress config file.

Once the database has been created click the privilages tab and create a new user. Make sure the username and password are the same as your wordpress config file. Point your browser to “http://localhost/wordpress” you should get the wordpress installation page, enter your blog title and e-mail address. Take note of the username and password that comes up on the next screen its wise to change the password to something more rememberable. Your wordpress installation is complete. You can now start adding your themes into the normal theme directory as you would if you were on a server online. You can also look at any offline webpages you might have, just create a folder called “what ever” inside the “htdocs” folder, place your index.html file inside the “what ever” folder. Point your browser to “http://localhost/what ever folder/index.html.

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