Most of the professional blogs and a large number of websites are hosted on WordPress platform. If you’ve a large number of visitors to your WordPress site, it would help if you install a copy of WordPress on your local computer. This will help you to test various themes and plugins locally before you implement the changes on your regular online WordPress site. Test your changes on your local computer on WordPress, and once you’re satisfied with them, make the corresponding changes on the online site. This will ensure that the browsing experience of the visitors to your WordPress site is not broken or disturbed by your sudden erratic changes. In fact, installing WordPress on your Windows XP machine is now possible in just about 5-10 minutes’ time. Here is a step-by-step guide to install WordPress on your Windows XP computer. It will work properly on XP Home edition; for the XP Professional edition, you may have to stop the IIS server from running in order to run the Apache server that we need for the WordPress installation on the local computer.
(1) Download XAMPP software from SourceForge website. XAMPP is a free and open-source software and it includes the Apache web server, MySQL, PHP, Perl, a FTP server and phpMyAdmin. All these software will be installed by XAMPP. Its download size is about 46 MB for its latest version 1.7.2 for Windows.
(2) Install XAMPP on your computer like any other program. Once it is installed, XAMPP Control Panel link / icon will appear on your Start menu and desktop.
(3) Start XAMPP Control Panel program. It will start in the form of a small window. Click on the “Start” button in front of “Apache” and also the “Start” button in front of “MySql” in this XAMPP Control Panel window. Both these programs should now start running on your computer, and the XAMPP Control Panel window will show “Running” word in front of “Apache” and “MySql”, as shown in the following figure:
(4) Now, your “local web server” or the “local host” is up and running. It’s ready to “host” a website on your local computer. Since, you’re interested to “host” your local website / blog on the WordPress platform, you’ll now have to download and install WordPress software on your computer. However, before doing that, let’s first create a database for the WordPress blog.
(5) Start your browser. Type “http://localhost/” in the address bar of the browser. Remember that now you’re not visiting the Internet but your “local host”. Your browser will now run the local host with the “XAMPP for Windows” being displayed therein (see following figure):
(6) Now, from the left sidebar, under the Tools section, click on the phpMyAdmin application link to start it in your browser. It will appear as under:
(7) To create a new database using phpMyAdmin, you’ve to use “MySQL localhost” section in the central part of the above screen. For the name of database, enter “wordpress” and from the first drop-down list box, select “Collation” if it is not selected already. In the second drop-down list box, select “uft8_unicode_ci” which may be the last item in the list box. The “MySQL localhost” section should now appear as under:
Confirm whether you’ve made the correct changes and then click on the Create button to create the “wordpress” database. You should get a success message in the next screen informing you that “Database wordpress has been created”. Moreover, this new database will now be displayed on the left sidebar of the phpMyAdmin screen in your browser. It will also show that no tables were found in the database. That’s alright since you’ve just created an empty database and the tables are yet to be added through WordPress software.
(8) Now that your database is ready, you can download and install WordPress software on your local computer that will allow you to host your blog on your local computer. For doing so, first download the latest version of WordPress software from the WordPress official site. This download is in a zip file format. At the time of this writing, the latest version of WordPress is 2.8.6 and its download size is about 2.3 MB.
(9) After WordPress is downloaded, unzip the downloaded file into the “htdocs” sub-folder of “xampp” folder wherein the XAMPP software was installed earlier. For example, if XAMPP software is installed on your computer in the “C:\xampp” folder, then you’ll have to unzip the WordPress files in the “C:\xampp\htdocs” sub-folder. Take care to unzip these files in the correct folder. In fact, these files may get copied in the “C:\xampp\htdocs\wordpress” sub-folder; that’s alright.
(10) Next, locate the “wp-config-sample.php” file in the “C:\xampp\htdocs\wordpress” folder. The exact location / address for this file would thus be “C:\xampp\htdocs\wordpress\wp-config-sample.php”. Open this file using Notepad to edit it as explained below.
(11) Locate the “// ** MySQL settings” section in this file. It will appear as shown in the following figure:
(12) Now, change the following four lines in this file by editing it, and these lines should now appear as under (after editing):
/** The name of the database for WordPress */
define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘wordpress’);
/** MySQL database username */
define(‘DB_USER’, ‘root’);
/** MySQL database password */
define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ”);
/** MySQL hostname */
define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’);
Please note that you’ve to change the database name to “wordpress” as you’ve created database with that name. Username will have to be changed to “root” and that is the user name for MySql. The password will have to be empty for the “root” user name; just remove the default password by editing the above file; however, DON’T remove the single quote marks; so, now you’ll have just two single quote marks with no password in-between them. Lastly, the MySql hostname should be “localhost” and most probably this name might already be there in the file.
After you make these changes, use the “SAVE AS” option in Notepad to save this file with the different name of “wp-config.php”, but don’t change the folder. The relevant changed portions of this file will now appear in Notepad as under:
(13) Finally, we’re ready to install WordPress. Ensure that XAMPP Control Panel program is running and Apache and MySql applications are shown as “Running” in this control panel. This is necessary to run local host on your computer (see, step 3 above). Type “http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php” in the address bar of your browser to install WordPress on your computer. WordPress installation will start. Follow the on-screen instructions which are simple to follow. Type a name for your first blog when prompted. Enter an email address. On the next screen, you’ll be shown a machine-generated password for the default “admin” user for your first blog. Copy that password since you’ll need it to login to the WordPress dashboard on your local computer.
And, WordPress will be installed in a couple of minutes on your computer! You’re now ready to start using WordPress on your computer. Login to the WordPress dashboard on your local machine using the “admin” username and the password copied as above. Once you sign in to the dashboard (which should look familiar to you if you’ve been using WordPress for your online website), change your password to something that you can remember.
Create your first post. In fact, the default “Hello Word” post is already there! Type “http://localhost/wordpress/” in the address bar of the browser and you’ll notice that the default first blog post is already running in your browser! See the figure below:
That’s it! Enjoy using WordPress blog on your local computer.
[Note: Remember to “Stop” Apache and MySql applications in the XAMPP software and then to close XAMPP Control Panel, once you’ve finished your work with your local host.]
Did you like this article? To get all such articles from Tech Superb directly:
Related Articles:
If you would like to make a comment, please fill out the form below.
