When I talked to a friend about learning wordpress development he said why do you want to learn wordpress now? Its an old technology. Now everyone is moving to either Medium or having their own blog developed from scratch.
It’s a true, a reality. With node, MEAN stack, Swift for server side and similar other frameworks a developer can build and run his own site with latest technology. WordPress still works on php, MySQL – the classic xAMP stack.
Why do you want to learn wordpress now? Its an old technology. Now everyone is moving to either Medium or having their own blog developed from scratch.
This doesnt mean we should stop learning old technology which are still doing good. Those are the systems which are still doing good, scaling good. They are thought through and are designed in a better way to last long compared to any new platforms today. I mean Facebook is still powered by php.
This doesn’t mean new technology is not there in terms of scalability. Sad truth is most never get opportunity to scale. Some never see the light of the day and some which get to see hardly have any subscribers and developers of that blog never scale them.
Why am I learning this now?
Learn and understand, experiment, know inside of it and whereabouts of what needs to be done then customize it according to your needs.
- WP gives a base to start creating your own websites primarily blogs.
- Lot of templates available or build your own and share.
- Spend time in customizing as per your needs rather than build from scratch.
- We can learn how various components are used.
- Architectures and patterns followed.
- The schema design.
- Its always interesting to learn old technologies.
This is the reason why I went ahead with starting on wordpress. As a first step I wanted to install wordpress and try some themes and plugins. But to install I need a server to host and need a database hosting too. Next I searched for how to install WordPress locally on my system? got the results.
It needs a xAMP stack – Apache-MySQL-PHP either on Linux, macOS or Windows. I have a macOS. Now next come how to start a Apache server? After some searching on internet Found MAMP which makes your task very easy. MAMP is for macOS and Windows too and there is another one WAMP for windows only.
There is no better way to have a server of your own for free and do your experiments. And the only best way for this full freedom installing it locally on your system.
Install WordPress locally:
- Download MAMP
- Install MAMP or WAMP as per their site
- Download WordPress Remember this is wordpress .org not .com
- Unzip the downloaded wordpress file, you must get a folder – wordpress
- Copy the wordpress folder into installed MAMP folder’s htdocs folder*
- Now click on Start servers
- Once the loading spinners stop and you see green in front of Apache and MySQL your servers are running
- Open your favorite browser and type http://localhost:8888 and hit enter
- Set up database –
- Go to localhost/phpmyadmin
- Go to Databases, add a name for the table and click Create
- Configure WordPress –
- Now open a browser tab and type localhost:8888/wp-admin
- Follow the wizard
- When asked for enter Database name, username, password, Host
- By default username and password both are ‘root‘
- Leave the Table prefix as it is and click Submit
- Next click on Run Installation
- Give a name, username-password and email-id for your blog
- Click on Install wordpress. Success!
- Now when you login, you should be able to see Admin console
Congrats!! You are up and running wordpress instance locally
*Alternatively you can also set the path from which MAMP has to serve. Launch MAMP – Go to Preferences – Web Server tab – Change the Document Root folder.
Where to go from here?
I am yet to do this, but definitely next step is to design your website and customize your wordpress installation. Here is a 7 video series on how to build a wordpress site
Now explore installing themes, creating a couple of themes and plugins. Along with creating them it will be interesting to understand how everything fits. I have just installed WP on my system and yet to explore all these.
This is where I learnt how to install WordPress locally.
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