On this week’s episode, we are going to talk about the brand-new software called Local. It’s by Flywheel and it’s how to build a website on your computer, right here on Your Website Engineer Podcast Episode No. 317.

Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Your Website Engineer podcast, the last episode for 2016. It’s hard to believe that this year is almost over and we’re getting ready to flip the calendar page to a brand-new year. And I thought the best way to do that in the Your-Website-Engineer-podcast way is to talk about a brand-new tool that you could use in the coming year to help you develop websites that are faster, quicker and easier.

But first, let’s go ahead and dive in to some announcements. The very first thing I want to share with you today – and it has been kind of a slow news week. It’s right here between, you know, Christmas and New Year’s and it’s just been kind of slow.

But one of the big things that have happened this week is WordPress.org has made a new home page, redesigned live. And the meta team, which is a volunteer-based team, did a lot of work at WordCamp US and now it’s the very first iteration you can see if you just head on over to WordPress.org. And it’s a matter of just, like, taking some community steps together to build this thing out. It is just a first step. It’s got a lot of design iterations to go but it kind of looks like the brand-new version of the WordPress Plugins directory. So they’ve kind of merged those types of things together.

It’s got a lot of – It just had a lot of prototyping done at WordCamp while there were some folks that were all around in the – from the community – kind of in one space. And then they launched it in the past week or so. So, if you want to see a brand-new version of WordPress.org, head on over to, obviously, WordPress.org.

Alright. The next thing that I want to share with you today is a brand-new theme called Wallace and it is a free WordPress theme built on the WP Rest API and Angular, which is a version of JavaScript. And this is a plugin – or a theme that’s been created by Bradley Kirby. And Kirby’s been working on this project for the past two years. He’s rewritten it a couple times. And it is a very beautiful theme. It is a very basic theme right now. It only supports posts, not – no pages or custom-post types or comments or anything like that.

So, it’s very basic but it’s really neat to go and see what you can do specifically with JavaScript and just, the flight works really, really well and it loads extremely fast. So, if this is something you want to check out, definitely head on over to the link in the show notes for – in Episode No. 317 – it is wallacetheme.com or it can take you there directly.

Alright. And lastly, I’ve got a plugin that I want to share with you today. And the plugin today is called MyBookProgress by Author Media. And this is a WordPress plugin, tracking – for authors – to help track their progress and communicate with the readers of where they are with developing and writing their book.

And so, you can have these updates show up in your sidebar. You can set up MailChimp integrations, so you can – people can subscribe to get your email book – or to your email list to get your book updates. You can do deadline tracking. You can do a bunch of stuff inside the application, which is really nice. So, one of the sidebar widgets that you can set up is, like, a book cover; you could say your day and you could say what phase of the book you’re in and when that phase of the book is over. So maybe your rough draft is due in a month and you could see a little progress bar there – you know, because it’s counting down to a specific day.

So, you could do that. You can say – You can change different colors. You can do – You can see how many people are, you know – Like, you can put in a current pace, like how many words per day you’re writing. You can do all this kind of stuff. So, if you’re an author or an aspiring author, this may be a plugin that’s of some interest to you. So check out MyBookProgress by Author Media on the WordPress repository.

Alright, today I wanted to talk about a brand-new tool that’s been out there about a month or so. And it’s no surprise that I love talking about work flows and just the best way to do things and how to be more efficient. And just my overarching – like, when I figure out something and I really like it and it works well for me, like, that’s when I tend to share it.

A few years ago, it took me a long time to try to figure out how I was going to work on websites locally because I knew that that was important. I saw value in working on my website locally. And then I wanted to deploy all of my changes to the live server in some way, shape or form. And so, I spent a couple years trying to just – probably not a couple years but a few months, back before I started working at Automattic – just really developing and trying to figure out: Okay, what’s the best work flow?

And I started out with a program called MAMP. And MAMP is software that you can use for your Mac and you can – there’s also equivalents called WAMP for Windows, for your Windows PCs. But I started using the software and started developing my websites locally.

And it was kind of a pain to set up. You could set up your server and what-not within MAMP and then you’d have to, like, manually install a WordPress site. And it was very unintuitive. It was made for, you know, web servers but not specifically WordPress.

Well, then fast-forward a year or so ago – or a year or so later. I was able to meet some of the founders of a product called DesktopServer by ServerPress.com. I met them at the WordCamp and they were just showing me how easy it was to create a WordPress website and just do everything locally on your computer. And I was like, “Wow! This is really nice” and it worked really well.

And DesktopServer has been my tool of choice for years and years and years. I’d say probably since 2012, I think, is when I discovered them – 2012, 2013. So it’s been about four years or so since I’ve started using DesktopServer and I use it primarily to manage all of my websites that I have running locally on my computer.

And how I use this is I have copies of all of my live websites running right here on my computer but then I also take time – like, if I am doing a live demo at a WordCamp or if I want to test something – you know, a unique situation that maybe a customer has brought in a ticket for – then I set up a different site, you know, inside my computer and I put only the plugins that are necessary on that device or what-not, so that I can really troubleshoot and figure out what’s going on.

And my last – The WordCamp talk that I did in the last three WordCamps, I set up a brand-new development site just for those WordCamps. And it made it really easy because then I didn’t have to worry about if the internet was working or not, you know, inside of the venue hall and what-not.

So, I really enjoy working locally. It seems like you can work faster. It seems like – Well, I know you can work faster because then you have your code editor; you’ve got that opened up right on your website – right on your computer. You hit “Save” and then you refresh the browser and it automatically refreshes, which is nice.

So, I’ve been using DesktopServer for the longest time, like I said. And I develop locally and then, as soon as those sites are done locally, I do some version control locally on my computer and it pushes all those changes live to a server.

I’m not going to talk about that today but what I want to talk about is this brand-new piece of software and it’s called Local by Flywheel. It actually, what is a – It used to be called Pressmatic and this was a plugin – or a software package – that was created by folks and it was called Pressmatic. And Flywheel has now purchased Pressmatic and turned it into their own Local. They call it Local by Flywheel and it allows you to create these websites on your computer as well.

Now, the big catch is that it is Mac-only right now but there are some neat features that Pressmatic or Local by Flywheel has that DesktopServer doesn’t.

So, the neat part about Local is that it is hot swappable between Apache or NGINX. So you could go in and you could say, like: I want to run this development site on NGINX because that’s the server that I’m using and I want this one over here to run Apache because that’s what I’m using. The goal is to kind of mirror your local environment to your live environment as close as possible.

The other nice part about Local is it gives you the ability to switch PHP versions and this is hot swappable as well. So that means you can easily switch between PHP Version 5.2, 5.3, 5.6 and 7.0, which is nice, whereas DesktopServer is locked in at 5.5.24, I think is what the current version is.

And so, those are like some of the really nice features that I’ve noticed. Other cool things that are built in to Flywheel – or built into Local – I’ll get the naming of this right, I promise. But it has SSL-enabled sites, which is nice because it gives you the ability to go in and really troubleshoot and figure out what’s going on, on SSL-enabled sites. And so, that’s nice as well. The – You can simulate all of that locally without having to actually get an SSL certificate and what-not. It does a really great job with that.

Another thing that’s nice it gives you the ability to do site templates or Blueprints, is what they call it at DesktopServers. And you can control like what files are included and what plugins and themes and all that kind of stuff. You can just create a Blueprint and then it’s easy to start a brand-new site from that Blueprint.

One other thing that I really like about using Local is it gives the ability to create a live URL to your local environment. So, what does that mean? And this doesn’t really – like, this won’t really work well for me because I’m not a developer, developing clients’ websites.

But how I can see this value is you’re creating your website locally on your computer and then, if your client wants to see your progress, instead of, like, spending all the time to upload it to a server and configure it; make sure that it looks good, it’s live and then Google can crawl it and all those things, you can just create this live URL that will take them and it will show them a version of your website running on your computer, which is really crazy to think about. Maybe they put the website in the Cloud somehow, so it works but, whatever the case is, it works really, really well.

We did little experiments within some teammates the other day and it just – it worked really well. We were able to see exactly what his development website looked like and what-not.

So those are some of the things that I really like about Local. The – I’m trying to see if there’s anything else here in my notes that I can see.

They’re still working on getting the technology ready for Windows. And so, Windows will be released soon but – so that’s coming. And then they’re also working on direct deploy so you can deploy directly from your computer, which will make speeding up, like, all of the little steps involved with setting up and taking those files from your local machine onto your live server. It’s going to speed all of those processes up.

So, this is a free software from Local – or from Flywheel. I decided to give it a try. I wanted to try to see if it was better or worse or just kind of an overarching, like: What’s different and how does it work?

And so the – I have to say, that the UI is beautiful. It is so much nicer than DesktopServer and – Just in the fact that DesktopServer just looks a little bit older; it looks a little bit more clunky. But Flywheel looks really, really great.

When you install it, it needs to have – I noticed that it needed to have, like, an internet connection as it was installing. And it installs VirtualBox, so I’m assuming it’s downloading things from the internet because I tried to set it up when I was in Airplane mode or I was off Wi-Fi and it didn’t work. But it was setting up a VirtualBox, it’s setting up a host machine, it’s setting up a local image. It kind of runs through those types – those three things – and then you get to the point where it says, “Let’s go. There’s no sites created. Time to create one.”

And so, you add the site button and then there are actually settings for defaults, so you don’t have to – Like, if you have a specific – like you always want to use PHP Version 7 or if you always want to use NGINX over Apache – like, you can set those up as the base defaults. But then, as you start the site set-up, it will ask you for the site name, the site domain, the site path. And then, you set those things up; then you can choose the environment, so you’d pick PHP. You pick your web server – NGINX or Apache. Then you pick the MySQL version.

So those are all set as your presets and then, it will ask for your – If you want to set up WordPress Multisite, you put in your WordPress Admin user name and your Admin password and then your Admin email. And then you click the “Add Site” button and it will set all of that up.

You can also determine what folder you want these sites in. So, if you want them to be in your Dropbox folder or if you want them just on a site – you know, locally on your hard drive – you can do that as well. So, once the site is live, then there’s a link there that you can click to either go to the Admin page or the live-site view of your website and you can just – It just works. Like, that’s all you have to do. Like, it works really well and you can add multiple sites.

The problem is, like, you can’t easily go in and switch from DesktopServer to Local. Like, it’s kind of a pain and I haven’t really set this up myself but I’ve read through some instructions of – you basically have to export your website and then export the database and then set up a new site over here with Local. And then from there, then you have to – Once your WordPress site is set up, then you can import all of your files, import the database and then you’re off to the races and you can start going.

So, it’s not the easiest process if you want to just ditch DesktopServer and move to Local but, on the other hand, you can run both of those side-by-side and so you have those features as well.

DesktopServer has a few extra abilities that make it really nice. They give you the ability to have, like, a local Admin color. So, like, on my DesktopServer websites, I have an orange bar that goes across the top instead of the standard black bar and that just gives me a visual indication that I’m on a local site. They – DesktopServer also has the ability to do a – it’s a drop-down box but you can skip past the log-in credentials. So you can say, “Oh. I want to log in as the Admin” – you know, maybe the Admin name is “Dustin” – and then you can just click on that drop-down menu and it will automatically log in.

Obviously, it’s just – It’s not – This isn’t built for live sites, it’s just built for local sites. But if you are trying to test between a few different configurations, whether it’s, you know, the subscriber role or the administrator role, you can do that and you can switch very, very easily.

There doesn’t look like there’s any plugins, per se, ready for Local quite yet and so, that’s something that is coming. It looks like there’s a lot of features – or a lot of plans for adding improvements and features. And there’s also a Pro version that’s coming for Local.

But I felt that everything that Local can do in the free version is about what – or I guess I’m saying, like, you can do an awful lot of things with the free version of Local versus the $100.00-per-year plan with DesktopServer. DesktopServer, on the free plan, only allows you to have three websites and they kind of limit your abilities with exporting and importing. And so, they want you to update to that bigger version or that Pro version of the account.

So, once you get a website all set up inside of Local, you can click on the website and then you can say “Save As Blueprint” and it’s going to save all of the settings, which is nice. It makes you – It makes it really, really easy to create a brand-new site with that set-up.

I know that I’m going to set this up and so I have a version of WooCommerce and Storefront and some of the main themes that I work on and the main plugins and what-not. I have that set up as a Blueprint, so – Boom. I can click that Blueprint and just automatically get going.

So, that’s kind of what I want to share with you today. That’s like the main thing. It doesn’t matter which tool you use, even if you want to use MAMP or WAMP or there’s one called, even, XAMPP – X-A-M-P-P. There’s lots of different variations you could do out there. Just, some of those other ones are a little bit more manual. DesktopServer and Local seem to be the two that are the most WordPress-centric and focused on making the WordPress experience great.

So, if you’re interested and you’re running a Mac, I would definitely check out Local by Flywheel. You can head on over. I think the website is local.getflywheel.com and it is just a great, easy way to get started building a website locally. I think that should be one of your – one of all of our goals: To be able to develop locally, so we can test changes out. So we can do things on a local environment so, in case something happens when we do an upgrade – you know, maybe we upgrade a version of a plugin or we change our theme or something – your main website is not broken.

So I’d say that should be, like, a big item on your to-do list for the coming year is just to spend some time figuring out: Okay. What kind of strategy do I need to have so that I can do some testing and I can do some things on my – a copy of my website instead of my live website?

And that’s going to be my goal: To set up Local and get Local as my – kind of my main environment for my testing on the Automattic side of things. And I think you should test it out if you’ve got a Mac and, like I said, I’ll give you an update when I know that the Windows version has come out. I’m excited, too, because this actually – I’m using Flywheel as my host and so, I want to see what that direct deploy looks like and how easy it is to get all of these changes from my website on my computer to my Flywheel server up in the Cloud somewhere.

So that’s what I want to share with you this week. I will talk to you again next week and next week will be 2017. Hard to believe. And, until then, take care and we’ll talk again soon. Bye-bye.