Safely Tweaking Your WordPress Blog

You must have been there at least once. Installing a new plugin or trying a new cool tweak on your theme, and when you save and anxiously go to view your site you find out that it’s become unreadable in some way.

It may take five minutes or it can take an hour to return your blog to its previous state, either way, if you have an established blog that’s getting traffic, quite a few readers will going to raise an eyebrow at your slip. If there were a newcomer at this time, he would probably just browse through without missing a beat.

The importance of locally testing your creativity

Locally testing your tweaks, plugins and new design ideas could save you from all that. It is quite simple to do but can be intimidating for the beginner.

It is simple, just follow me…

1. Install a web-server on your computer

• Download and install a web-server on your computer. A web-server will enable you to run web-sites hosted on your machine instead of the hosting provider.

• I’m using the free and user friendly WampServer that you can download here:
  http://www.wampserver.com/en/download.php

• Follow through the installation wizard without any customizations, which is enough for our purpose, and you should not run into any problems.

• Choose to run WampServer on completion of the installation.

2. Create a DataBase

• Left click on the WampServer tray icon

• Click on phpMyAdmin

• In the ‘Create new database’ field insert the name for your database (e.g.: myblog)

• Click Create

• Close the browser window without creating any tables

3. Open the WordPress package

• Download the latest WordPress package from here: http://wordpress.org/download/

• Open the contents of the wordpress folder in the archive to a directory of your choice (e.g.: myblog.com) that you will create in the \www directory of the WampServer installation. (c:\wamp\www\myblog.com)

4. Create the wp-config.php file

• inside your myblog.com directory there is a wp-config-sample.php

• rename it to wp-config.php

• open it in your text editor

• change the putyourdbnamehere in DB_NAME to your database name (myblog)

• change the usernamehere in DB_USER to your username (root)

• change the yourpasswordhere DB_PASSWORD to nothing (”)

• leave everything else as it is

• Save

5. Installing WordPress

• Open your web browser and go to: http://localhost/myblog.com/wp-admin/install.php

• Enter whatever you want in the blog title and e-mail

• Click Istall WordPress

• After the installation has competed note the username and password to login in to WordPress

If you try to go to http://localhost/myblog.com you’d hit your local version of your “naked” blog. But, continue to the next step to dress it in your theme and plugins.

6. Copy the themes and plugins

• Use your FTP client to copy the wp-content/plugins to your local location (c:\wamp\www\myblog.com\wp-content\plugins)

• Copy your theme from the /wp-content/themes/ to the the local \wp-content\themes the same way.

7. Activate the theme and plugins

• Go to http://localhost/myblog.com/wp-admin

• Enter your username and password and you’ll find yourself in the familiar backend of WordPress. Ahhh…

• Activate your plugins

• Switch to your theme

That’s it.

Now you have your local blog operational. The perfect testing grounds. Test your genius locally first, and then, when everything works, go live!

• To access your blog just go to http://localhost/myblog.com
• To access your admin panel, go to http://localhost/myblog.com/wp-admin

- Alex

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