Installing WordPress locally via XAMPP and MAMP.
I’ve been wanting to install WordPress and on a server of some sort just to play around with it and see what can be done. I know many people out there use wordpress to build their websites and I wanted to see how this would work so I made up my mind to dive in. As usual I fired up google and hopped around to see how this could be done. I found out that many hosting companies actually have a software in their control panels that allow you to do this pretty easily and I tried this out with one of the websites that I manage. However, I didn’t want to put anything on a server perse but set out to do this locally first so I can mess with WordPress itself w/out worrying about someone else coming across it on the web. I soon found out that you can install it locally both on Windows XP and using XAMPP which I was interested in doing for work and on Mac OS using MAMP (You can use XAMPP on Mac OS X as well but I found MAMP easier to work with) plus you can use a little dashboard widget to make sure your services are running. I used these instructions for installing MAMP and WordPress on my Mac and had no trouble at all. For the Windows machine at work I used the instructions here. After doing all of this I decided to scrap the one at work because I didn’t want to get into any issues of security with the IT folks. Although I work in the IT Dept. I’m on the GIS side of things so I decided that I didn’t want to get my hands slapped for messing with security or at least having anyone think that I’m messing with security. For now its running at home where I have a bit more time to test and play at will.
