local development

WordPress, technology, and miscellaneous thoughts.

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Local Development for Beginning Developers

Local development is the practice of using your local machine to develop websites or web applications. Didn’t know you could do that? Sure you can. A web server is basically a big, powerful computer — and you can install software and similar that can help you turn your local computer into a place where you can develop websites.

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Web Design and Development Workflow

This is a post describing my workflow for creating a website from scratch. It’s not necessarily right, just descriptive of what I do. If you see any flaws or potential areas of improvement, please let me know. This is primarily relevant to personal projects, where I do exactly what I want regardless of what anyone else wants out of me. This is not likely to succeed in environments where you’re working on a team! Added — this isn’t really step-by-step. Sometimes I’ll go back to Photoshop after doing the colors in code to design some specific things. I definitely doodle […]

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Use WordPress Admin Themes to Differentiate Local and Live Environments

Quick post because I am a busy, busy, tired person but good things are totally happening (yay!). Use WordPress admin themes to differentiate your local development and live environments. Though I always run a local development environment, I frequently need to look on the live website to make sure the settings are the same or check different things, etc.

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XAMPP Installation and Common Problems

What We’re Trying to Do We’re trying to set up a local web development environment on a Windows computer with an XAMPP installation. XAMPP will allow us to run Apache and MySQL on our local computer. Apache is a web server technology: it allows us to run PHP. MySQL is a database technology: it allows us to create and operate MySQL databases. For more information, see the Apache and MySQL sites. Don’t get lost — extensive knowledge isn’t required to use XAMPP. We want Apache and MySQL because without them, we cannot run PHP/MySQL applications such as WordPress or phpBB. […]

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Importing Large MySQL Database with XAMPP

Even locally, phpMyAdmin has a size limit to the database you can import. You can change those limits, I’m pretty sure, but you can also bypass phpMyAdmin altogether and import the database with the XAMPP shell. Open the XAMPP shell (“Shell” button on your XAMPP Control Panel). Type: mysql -h localhost -u root database_name < J:\path\to\database.sql Change database_name to the name of the database you want to import to. Change the \path\to\database.sql to the appropriate path and filename. I'm working locally with XAMPP so I don't set a password on my root MySQL user (this is default behavior in XAMPP […]

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