Good to be back on the blog today! I actually had to work this week, I hate it when work gets in the way of my technology habit.
Last week I got MAMP on my MacBookPro up and running with WordPress Installed. It is the only way to go! I have to admit I have been doing lots of “live” editing of the CSS on my theme and playing with completely different themes. Now I have my exact WordPress setup installed and running on my MBP and can experiment and tweak without making the actual changes to the live blog. This is a much better system for dealing with WordPress and when you move onto making webpages that use AJAX and PHP you can test right on your computer without having to wait for uploads to your live server. Now lets get into the meat of how this went, what I learned.
I thought about doing a complete step-by-step tutorial on how to do this with screenshots and such but I would just be repeating what others have already done. I am brand new at all of this, so I figure if I just show you the “tools” that I used and share any problems that I had with you it should be helpful. Please feel free to ask questions if you run into something I said that you don’t understand, I will try and help.
First Step: So, the first thing to do is watch this video by Andrew Gormley. Andrew does a great job and explains the limitations of the mac built-in Apache Server and steps you through installations of MAMP on your computer and then lightly touches on each feature within MAMP.
Notes: for right now do not worry about MAMP Pro, I will touch on this at the end. Follow Andrews directions and just stick with the free version of MAMP it is the only version most users will need. MAMP and MAMP Pro will install together, you get to use the Pro version for a trial test period then will have to pay. For now just use MAMP it’s what Andrew uses in his video.
Second Step: Now that you have MAMP installed and running you need to install WordPress or other CMS, there are other videos here at the MAMP Vimeo Channel on installing other CMS like Joomla. The next video is by Andrew also and is the start of step 2 watch it here. This video takes you through downloading WordPress and installing it into the proper MAMP directory and creating your first MySQL database. This was great learning for me, I did not understand the relationships between all the components like I should and doing these steps really made things clear.
Notes: If you follow everything through you should not have any problems at all, this is a very easy set-up. If you have to ever set-up WordPress manually on a real server this is exactly how you would do it also. I went back into my “real” server and played with everything to make sure things would of worked the same way. CAUTION! Be very careful experimenting with the back-end of your live server, you can screw things up in a hurry. I say this out of experience! yes, I screwed up my blog and took it off-line because in the process of getting into my SQL database to copy things I changed the password and then my WordPress PHP could not access the database. This was a simple fix of exactly what Andrew does in the video of going into your WordPress files (wp-config.php) via FTP and changing your database name and password. By the way, I had lousy support from my hosting provider, they do not help at all with your screw ups of your system files. I hope that your hosting company has better help than mine, I probably need to change.
Third Step: This one is optional but really helps in your theme and design process. You now have WordPress up and running on your MAMP server but now it helps to have your exact theme and blog content. Just go into your WordPress admin page like normal and everything works the same, download your current theme or if you have a customized theme copy it from your live server and paste it into your MAMP server. You will find all your theme files in your main WordPress folder under wp-content/themes. Once you have your theme downloaded it’s nice to have all of your content so you can truly see how changes to your theme look with all of your list’s, pictures, paragraphs, etc. you do this right in your WordPress admin, under the Tools Tab on your current blog go to tools and then export, save the file then on your MAMP WordPress admin page go to Tools and Import, here you can import the file you just exported and poof, you have all of your content. Now you can experiment away without having to make real changes to your live blog.
Final Notes: This is pretty painless if you follow the videos, I did have one problem that I could not solve and that was using MAMP Pro. I always tend to gravitate to the “upgraded” version of everything for the advanced tools and I like to support the folks that spend a ton of time making these wonderful pieces of software. I bought MAMP Pro and tried to set things up using it and would always get a permission denied message when trying to access my database. I believe it’s a small setting but hours of messing with it brought no fix for me. I ended up re-installing MAMP which comes with MAMP Pro but just using MAMP to setup my server not MAMP Pro. You always use the MAMP directory for installing databases and web pages but you have the option of using the MAMP Pro Interface for your settings and using advances features. Once you start using MAMP Pro you have to stick with it, if you set up your WordPress under the pro version and then try to access it with the regular free MAMP things will not work well, there is a caution against this on the MAMP FAQ, and a warning box on your computer if you start MAMP and not MAMP Pro. So, maybe you will have better luck with the Pro version than I had but for now I’m just using the free version and will play with the Pro version when I have time trying to get it to work. I will let you know when I solve the problem. I really want the Pro version to work, it has some very good advanced features.
I hope this helps you get things up and running, Never Stop Learning!
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