#ALTERNATIVE TO CODEKIT FOR WINDOWS HOW TO#
#ALTERNATIVE TO CODEKIT FOR WINDOWS FREE#

I haven’t tried it myself, but it may be worth looking into. I’ve recently heard of another (free) program called AMPPS that provides similar functionality to MAMP. And no, I’m not working on them all at once! I might be crazy, but not thaaaat crazy. This is my MAMP screen, and to the left are the zillions of local installations I have set up right now (including a local version of my own website, where I test all of my changes first before they go live). These local URLs are really easy to remember, and way sexier than localhost:8888… am I right?Įdit! Thanks to on Twitter for reminding me that even in regular (free) MAMP, you can have an unlimited number of sites - they’ll all just reside at I prefer having separate local domains for each installation for a variety of reasons, but it’s not entirely necessary, especially if you’re just starting out. I use MAMP Pro, and all of my local sites are named. If you’re going to be developing locally a lot, I’d recommend shelling out for MAMP Pro, which lets you run an unlimited number of local servers and name them whatever you want.

#ALTERNATIVE TO CODEKIT FOR WINDOWS FREE#

One drawback of the free version MAMP is that you can only have one local server running at once, and its address is always localhost:8888, which can be fairly limiting, especially if you’ve taken on multiple projects at once (story of my life). If the Codex is a little too dry and/or confusing, there’s a great screencast over at CSS Tricks on this very topic! Essentially, MAMP (or XAMPP or one of the other alternatives) sets up Apache, MySQL and PHP on your computer, which lets you run a local server that you can access, but that isn’t online for everyone else to see. If you’re not using a Mac, you can use XAMPP for Windows, which works similarly.

#ALTERNATIVE TO CODEKIT FOR WINDOWS HOW TO#

The WordPress Codex (aka your new best friend) has a good article about how to set up WordPress with MAMP. I personally run my local servers by using a program called MAMP. The server is what brings the two together, and this is why you need a server with PHP and MySQL to run WordPress. WordPress, like most content management systems, separates the site’s structure (which is PHP-based) from its content (which is stored in a MySQL database).

This means that the website has to communicate with a server in order to display the pages, unlike a static HTML website.

This post is going to focus on developing WordPress sites, because if you’re developing something more complicated than that, you probably already know enough about local development, do everything via command line, and don’t really need me! D Running the local serverĪs you’ve probably already figured out, WordPress is written in PHP, which is a server-side language. In my first post I gave you the theory, and in this one I’ll give you some more practical information. At last! The very long-awaited (oops) sequel to my previous post about why it’s so important to develop websites locally.

Alternative to codekit for windows