A glance at the black and white menu at the top of this blog will show that I have several copies of Wordpress in action. Moreover, I’ve installed Wordpress and modified themes for a number of friends. Such constant checking means using Filezilla a great deal.

But now my carpal tunnells will be grateful that I can test Wordpress offline. And that’s thanks to XAMPP and two fine tutorials.

XAMPP is a cross-platform “easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl.”

First of all go to this Ubuntu Forum thread by Petervk. It will show you how to easily install XAMPP, and almost as importantly for those of us still not up to command-line finesse, how to install the “the sweet gtk/python control panel” for XAMPP. This will save endless trouble.

Once you have it running, switch to the Rumore tutorial on HOWTO make a local copy of your Wordpress blog in Ubuntu. I should point out that its writer, problemdog, replied thus to the comment I left:

You’re welcome ! - though, to tell the truth, this is quite an old post and now I can’t really remember why I would want to use XAMPP for linux instead of regular apache and mysql installations.
But if it worked alright for you - i’m glad.
I also actually quit using phpmyadmin - mysql-admin (GUI) being an easier (and faster) interface (to me).

I appreciate that someone more advanced in these matters would move on, but for a learner like myself, this tutorial is almost perfect. I stumbled for a while at two points, due to my lack of experience, and perhaps it is worth repeating from the comment I left on Rumore.

Being a complete newbie, it took me a while to get around two instructions:
1)then go to http://localhost/phpmyadmin
This (not your fault) is a bit confusing, as the newbie has created a pass for phpmyadmin - pma +pass, so the newbie assumes to get into phpmyadmin, this is what the newbie uses. However, to create a database, the newbie has to log in as root+pass, as you say. It’s obvious when you know how, of course.

2)Now scroll down quite a lot until you see “Database-specific privileges”
I think if you put in the ‘Go’ instruction before going to the wp-config-sample.php, it would be clearer.

One problem not covered is that you need administrative priviliges to move files such as templates to public_html. This can be a real pain, but fortunately Nautilus scripts help out here. Go to Corelife to see how to install them. I couldn’t install the image-converter, for some reason, but the one relevant here, nautilus-gksu, is a gem.

Once you have all of that up and running, you might want to learn how to make your own Wordpress theme. Go to WPDesigner
for an excellent step-by-step tutorial. He uses XAMPP in Windows, but once you have the
XAMPP control panel mentioned above, there’s no difference. Even if you’re used to Wordpress templates as I am, the thing to do is forget everything, and get down to base, typing it all by hand. If you like learning, he’s an excellent teacher.