Professional WordPress: Design and Development, 2nd Edition

Chapter 3

Working with WordPress Locally

WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Developing locally
• Getting started with a local development environment
• Configuring a local development environment — tips and tricks
• Moving your local project to production

Now that you know how to obtain WordPress as well as what the basic lay of the land looks like, let’s take a look at how to get started doing something with WordPress, something beyond simply using WordPress as a website engine. Any user can install WordPress and use it to power a website, as you saw in Chapter 1, which is one of the reasons why WordPress has been so successful.

As a developer, however, you need a full-featured but sandboxed place to experiment, try out new ideas, and figure out what has failed, without taking down a production or public site. As the first step in building something, to take WordPress to the next step in your own projects, let’s look at the benefits of setting up a local development environment on your workstation or laptop. This chapter starts with a brief swing outside the realm of WordPress to talk about general software development.

BENEFITS OF WORKING LOCALLY

Developing locally is considered a best practice. In general, you do not want to be actively developing on a live production website because you could have visitors accessing the site at any time and development involves iterations of breaking code and making it work again. This is not the experience you want to provide to your visitors.

What is “developing ...