[ WordPress Tips ] Developing WordPress on Windows

Tools Summary for WordPress on Windows :

• WAMP
• Sublime text editor
• Cygwin

Introduction

(Here I assume that you originally develop WordPress on Mac/Linux and use a Linux server.)

In this post I want to share how to develop wordpress on windows. Being able to develop wordpress on windows enables us to build websites while using Office for opening many business documents.

Software Stack: WAMP

The software stack to use for wordpress is WAMP (windows, apache, MySQL and PHP). Similar to MAMP (for Mac), WAMP is an all-in-one solution that simultaneously setups the AMP development stack for you (with additionally phpadmin!)

WAMP localhost page and app options.

Caution on packages requirement

The installation is easy with one caution. After downloading the .exe file and executing it, the software specifically displays warning that it requires specific Visual C++ redistributable packages before proceeding WAMP installation. Also for 64-bit windows it requires both 32-bit and 64-bit Visual C++ redistributable packages.

Visual C++ requirements that you will see when running the installation file.

Open Windows’ App & Features tab to check these packages. If any is missing, simply click the links to install them.

Default browser and text editor

During the installation it also asks your default browser and text editor. For browser I personally use Chrome, which on windows it is at some place like C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe

For text editor it is ok to first use notepad as the default text editor. Later we can change this setting from the setting file wampmanager.conf at the application folder, under the “editor” setting line. For example, switching  the default editor to Sublime Text (introduced below) will be:

;Path of the Text Editor used by Wampserver
;May be modfied with the absolute path of the Text Editor exe file
;(Use / instead of \)
editor ="C:/Program Files/Sublime Text 3/sublime_text.exe"

Setting up MySQL and WordPress

Now that you have the WAMP installed, you can then proceed to setup MySQL and install wordpress. See the following tutorial for detailed steps:

[Tutorial #5] Bring WordPress Live : Skip the apache2 configuration.

Sublime Text Editor

A really nice text editor for wordpress development is Sublime Text. It has many standard features like code highlights as well as advanced features like auto-suggest.

Sublime Text homepage with demo.

Cygwin: Linux Terminal on Windows

Finally, to connect your windows to (Linux) server, a nice tool that imitates Linux terminal on Windows is Cygwin.

Cygwin home page.

Installing Cygwin is easy: simply executing the .exe file and click through the default settings. Yet you can’t directly use it, as the brand new Cygwin does not come with many utility commands as we have for a real Linux operating system.

To download these commands, rerun the installation file. Click through “Next” till the “Select Packages” page:

Change view to “Full”. Type in the commands you want at “Search”. The matched package list will appear below. To install one of them, change the “Skip” label to “Keep” by clicking on it once.

Unfortunately there is no single formula to find all the packages. Search for the Internet for examples and do some trial-and-error. For example, search for “openssl” should give you setup with the ssh command to connect to online servers.

Putting All Together

Congratulation! Now you have all the elements to develop wordpress on windows!

• Building a local site on WAMP stack.
• Editing codes with Sublime Text editor.
• Access your online server via Cygwin.

Also Recommended:

Building a WordPress Multiple Topics Blog tutorial series

[WordPress Tools] Two Awesome WordPress Development Plugins

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