Test and Setup Local WordPress Blog For Testing Theme With XAMPP

This post is useful all WordPress Bloggers who edit their themes or modify their blog templates etc and all those who run WordPress Blogs. We have been changing and modifying WordPress themes on our blogs quite often. As the code changes or something is modified on the live blog, the look of the blog may get messes up for a while.

I wanted a copy of my blog to run locally on my computer, which is visible only to me, and on which I can make modifications and testing of themes and new looks.

So I looked for an alternative to test it locally first and then make the final changes on the blog by changing the files that I change locally on my computer. I came across a very useful utility called XAMPP. In this post I will explain you how to use XAMPP to test your WordPress blog on your computer.

First of all, Download and Install XAMPP from SourceForge. You can use XAMPP on Linux, Windows and Mac as well from this page.

After Installing XAMPP, run the XAMPP control panel. This will show a tray icon in right hand bottom corner like this:

You will see a control panel window when you click on this orange icon:

Make sure that Apache and MySql are running, if they are not running already press the start button in front of it.

Now to install WordPress blog on your computer, you need to create a wordpress database. First of all, open up the XAMPP page by typing the below address in your web browser:

http://localhost

This will open a XAMPP page, select the language from here.

After this open the phpMyAdmin link in the left sidebar and create a new database or import your existing database here.

After this you need to Install WordPress, for that you need to download and copy the latest version of WordPress from WordPress.org . Copy the extracted folder named WordPress at the following path on your computer (in windows)

C:\xampp\htdocs\wordpress

Inside this folfer, you will find a file name “wp-config-sample.php”, rename the file to “wp-config.php” and open the renamed file with notepad. Edit the following fields in this file which are highlighted in red:

DB_NAME – Name it as the database you created or uploaded. In my case, i named my database as test

DB_USER – By default, the user name is root

DB_password – By default this password is blank, so leave the field empty

Save the file and close it.

Now go to your web browser and type the following address:

http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php

This will open a wordpress install interface and just follow the instructions on the page to complete the setup of your local blog. After this install, you can open your local blog at the address:

http://localhost/wordpress

And you can open the wodpress admin login at

http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin

Hope you find this article useful.

This article is written by Rohit Khurana as Abhishek is not well for past some days. Till he becomes fit again, you may find fewer articles here. Rohit will keep publishing some article here once in a while. Please leave your suggestions and comments.

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