Developing WordPress on your PC with Xampp

This is a Windows Guide to setting up a localhost server with xampp, to develop WordPress offline. Why might you want to do this? Because you make changes much quicker, theres no need to use FTP, you can keep your favourite text editor open, hit save – refresh your browser and see the changes instantly.

Full instructions after the break.

First things first you will need to download Xampp from Apache Friends:

DOWNLOAD PAGE

We suggest you download the installer for the latest build 1.6.4.
Now you can install xampp by double clicking the installer we just downloaded. You can put xampp wherever you want but for the sake of this tutorial we will be using the default suggested path: C:\xampp.

Once xampp is installed you need to open up the Control Panel and make sure Apache and MySQL are running:

If they are not just hit start next to each of the options for Apache and MySQL.

Now open up a browser window and enter the following into your address bar:
http://localhost/xampp/splash.php

You now have a local server running on your pc, time to install WordPress 🙂

From the splash screen select your language, then click on phpmyadmin in the left navigation.

Your going to need to create a new database for your WordPress installation:

We called ours WordPress for demonstration purposes, also change the unicode selection on the right to utf8_unicode_ci and hit Create.Thats xampp setup for now. Onto WordPress 🙂

Download the latest build of WordPress from WordPress.org. Extract the main wordpress folder to: C:\xampp\htdocs\

Now open the WordPress config file wp-config-sample.php and set the following parameters:

// ** MySQL settings ** //
define('DB_NAME', 'wordpress');    // The name of the database
define('DB_USER', 'root');     // Your MySQL username
define('DB_PASSWORD', ''); // ...and password
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');    // 99% chance you won't need to change this value
define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');
define('DB_COLLATE', '');

(note: password is left blank)

Save and rename to wp-config.php
Thats it! now you can complete the install steps in your browser, navigate to:

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

and your done! you can now play with WordPress on your localhost, you dont need the WordPress text editor to edit theme files just open them in your favorite text editor!

This is the basic tutorial for Windows XP, we will try and update this post in the future with more advanced options, if you notice any errors in this tutorial or have any suggestions please let us know 🙂