My thought process for WordPress is to always create a local copy of your website to experiment and test things before you roll them out to the production or “LIVE” site. So to this end I often setup WAMPServer. All of the elements needed are available as open source software, which means it is developed by a community of developers and enthusiasts and give away for free as in “Free Beer”.
WAMPServer runs the basic elements needed to create a WordPress site and it works on Windows, which is what most people run on their laptops and home computers. WAMP is an acronym. It stands for Windows, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. There is a version for Mac called funny enough, MAMP, which is Mac OS, Apache, MySQL, and PHP.
Apache is an open source Web server. You can download and run Apache on nearly any operating system you can name. For more about Apache Web Server, visit here: http://httpd.apache.org/
MySQL is an open source database management server which is owned by Oracle Corporation. There is a paid version but the Community version works for just about every need. For more about MySQL, visit here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySQL
And lastly there is PHP, PHP is a programming language that is interpreted instead of compiled. What this means is instead of creating an executable file from source code, each line of source code in parsed through a PHP interpreter engine. For more about PHP, visit here: http://php.net/manual/en/intro-whatis.php
To download WAMPServer, go here: SourceForge (SourceForge by the way is a repository website that hosts many open source projects).
For a step by step video on installing WAMPServer, visit this link on my YouTube Channel:
My next post I will show and discuss the World Famous Five Minute WordPress install, assuming you have WAMPServer installed.
