037 – Editing Your WordPress Site Offline
The main topic of today’s show is how to use a free tool to make changes to your WordPress website while being offline.
Broken Theme – Seth warns the listeners about the broken Mystique theme – Stay Away. Use Graphene
Multiple Databases? – DeChamps writes in to let me know how he uses multiple databases for his WordPress installations. Is this a safe way to do this? Let me know!
Reasons to work offline
– Don’t have internet connection
– Have slow internet connection
– Want to see changes instantly
– You don’t want to break current live site
Steps (these aren’t exact, but close)
Download from: http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html
Install on Computer
Launch application
Turn on Apache, MySQL, FTP
Download WordPress from WordPress.org
Drag WordPress downloaded folder into the xamppfiles / htdocs
Change the permissions of the htdocs to allow everyone read / write access
Navigate to http://localhost
Under tools, choose phpAdmin and create a database (wordpress)
Now rename wp-config-sample.php to wp-config.php
Open wp-config.php with favorite editor
Set database name to wordpress
Set username to root
Set password to ”
Use the link provided to get secret codes:
https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/salt/
Paste new codes
Save the file with the new configurations
You should then get the WordPress set up screen
Go through the process of setting up your WordPress site and when you are done, you should see the 2011 theme.
Modify Current Site:
– Export all your posts from your current site online
– Use FTP to pull off all of your theme files and plugins
– Activate themes and plugins and
- If starting from scratch, I typically use the default WordPress theme, that came standard with WordPress back in the 2.0 days, you can still find it at: http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/default
Great discussion of XAMPP. I need to do offline editing quite a bit, and on my Mac I use MAMP. Like XAMPP, it’s very easy to install and set up, and it has saved me so much time. I wasn’t aware of XAMPP before, so I’ll take a look to see if it has any advantages.
Aug 18, 2011I think that they are both very similar. I just chose to try XAMPP first. It works great for me, so I didn’t need to try MAMP.
Aug 24, 2011Hey Dustin,
Thanks so much for the plugging my sites. I’ve worked very hard on them, and I am constantly tweeking. I really appreciate your kind words after all the hard work I’ve put in. It’s funny because after I emailed you about the Mistique theme I changed that site to the Graphene Theme and realized there was an update to Graphene that is SUPER cool. You can now customize the color of your theme, and I don’t mean just a little tweeking. You can change the colors full blown, including buttons and everything. This is an great theme and it is completely free at WordPress.org.
I’ve said it before, but I really appreciate your show and the information you’re providing. I started out with a vision to create a website less than a year ago, and now I have multiple sites, and I am very pleased with how they have all turned out. Your podcast has been tremendously helpful in my use of WordPress and I wish you success. If you’re new to WordPress or web design Dustin is your man!
Aug 24, 2011I think we all constantly tweak our sites 🙂 Once you get bit by the WordPress bug (or any coding bug for that matter), it’s non-stop. I’m always thinking, oh I should add this and this and this.
Awesome to know that there are even more advanced features for Graphene. That’s whats so great about the WordPress community. People loving giving and it helps all of us create powerful websites.
Thank you so much for listening and contributing to the show I appreciate it. It’s people like you that give me insights to somethings that I would never see / know about WordPress.
Aug 24, 2011You had asked for people who have suggestions on this topic. I have one, when debugging on your local computer you can change your hosts file. By changing your hosts file you could for example debug using xampp and point yourwebsiteengineer.com to 127.0.0.1. Doing this would allow you to debug offline and validate all of your links. In addition you could literally download your full production site and database to your local computer. Full post on my site under “How to Configure WordPress for your Domain, without DNS”
Apr 10, 2012@Danny M1 Great suggestion! I don’t think I’ve covered changing your host files on a show before. I’m adding that topic to my upcoming shows list. Thanks!
Apr 11, 2012What are the secret codes for, and why are they necessary?
Sep 17, 2013cdgrant Great question! I think this article describes it best: http://www.wpuniversity.com/wordpress-tips/wordpress-authentication-keys-and-salts/
Sep 17, 2013Hi,
Nov 17, 2013I’ve done all this, and now I want to change to a different theme in WordPress, and it asks my for the hostname of my web server. What would that be, since I don’t have on yet?
FrankKilkelly Try giving your entire WordPress directory permissions read/write privileges.
Nov 17, 2013dhartzler10 FrankKilkelly great thanks, where would I do that?
Nov 18, 2013FrankKilkelly depends. On a mac, you right click on the folder and “Get Info” and under sharing, change the privileges to “Read/Write” for all users. I’m not sure how to do it on windows. A quick google search may yield directions based on your version of windows.
Nov 20, 2013dhartzler10 FrankKilkelly Thanks so much, I did that, for all relevant folders, and still no joy. I’m a Mac user. Am I being too adventurous, knowing little about the tech side? Is enthusiasm enough?!!
Nov 20, 2013FrankKilkelly dhartzler10 I think you’d be better off installing a program called Desktop Server. You can find out more at http://serverpress.com. They make it ridiculously easy to run a local version of your site. I’m holding a webinar on Dec 6th that covers exactly how to set up a local environment.
Nov 25, 2013Its a good tutorial, i was searching for the software to eid my site http://www.best3dhdwallpapers.com offline, and i have found it here. Thanks for sharing the details.
Nov 27, 2013Any thoughts on using this for multiple sites? Every developer would want to do more than one at the same time…
Nov 12, 2015You can have multiple sites locally 🙂
Nov 13, 2015