169 – How to Create a WordPress Development Environment
Announcements
WordPress.com Business Users now have eCommerce
Announced today that WordPress.com Business users, now have the ability to link to their site into a store front for their businesses
Tools / Plugins
Gary has a great tool this week called Color Snapper is a great Mac OS X tool to capture colors from webpages.
Listener Feedback
Christopher want to know why installing WordPress manually is more secure than using the one click install scripts.
Jay is looking for a calendar plugin for his WordPress site. He has a non-profit that I support. I’ve used an embedded google calendar, but that get’s messy with permissions for people who can add things to the calendar. I figured there was probably a good plug in out there and you probably knew about it!
Tim is wondering how to get set up on Google Hangout and why I’ve recently discontinued my use of GoToMeeting.
Mark is looking for a way to stream audio to his WordPress site. My suggestion is to try justin.tv. Have you heard of a better way to stream audio?
How to Set Up a WordPress Development Environment
Ryan has a question about development environments. The summary of his audio question is he’d like to know what is a development environment and how to set one up.
A development environment is a copy of your site that’s stored either:
- on a server somewhere, like new.yoursite.com
- or locally with software like DesktopServer
Your development server doesn’t have to be exactly the same as your production site, but it should contain all of the plugins and widgets you have on your live site.
Then when it’s time to update a plugin, you can do so without worrying if the plugin update with have compatibility issues and crash your site.
A great video to watch is one of my webinar replays titled: How to Run WordPress Locally
Call To Action
How have you set up your WordPress Development site? Do you run a local copy or a copy on your server. Do you use software to run your site locally or to push changes to your live site?
Let me know in the comments below.
Thanks so much Dustin for answering my voicemail about updating my WP site in a “developer environment”. Great show and keep up the good work. -Ryan Urlacher
Mar 2, 2014Best wishes for bubs, that is great news!
Mar 3, 2014Just now listening to this episode. Regarding the ability to stream audio on a website, I’ve been testing out mixlr.com and so far cannot find any fault with it. You set up an account (free), install a desktop app, get your embed code and place it on your site, start up the desktop app and click to start broadcasting and the player on your site starts playing. The paid version ($10 per month) includes a few extras like ability to download the recording of your broadcast. I can’t imagine anything better for providing a live stream on your website.
Mar 16, 2014