Making a Wordpress CMS website on local machine?

Enc

If I wanted to use something like Wordpress or another content management engine to make a large scale website (say, 300+ pages), would it be possible to do so on my home computer and be able to navigate it and such without it being hosted online until it is sufficiently complete? I've worked a lot with wordpress cms and dabbled with older html pages on my home machine in the past, but I've never tried something of this scale before and want to cover my bases before I go forward with this.

As background, I'm trying to make a mixed media narrative website (story through pictures, words, sound, etc).

amateurhour

Enc wrote:

If I wanted to use something like Wordpress or another content management engine to make a large scale website (say, 300+ pages), would it be possible to do so on my home computer and be able to navigate it and such without it being hosted online until it is sufficiently complete? I've worked a lot with wordpress cms and dabbled with older html pages on my home machine in the past, but I've never tried something of this scale before and want to cover my bases before I go forward with this.

As background, I'm trying to make a mixed media narrative website (story through pictures, words, sound, etc).

Yeah, you can host a website on your local machine through IIS and just keep it offline until you're ready to upload it to the world, however you're going to need some kind of sql db manager to handle wordpress.

Enc

Hmmm, and where would I find something like that? In the past my webhost had that infrastructure and I didn't really touch it beyond the setup instructions.

TychoCelchuuu

Yep, just get yourself set up with XAMPP or something and install Wordpress like you would install it on your server. Moving the installation over isn't quite as easy as hitting "move" but it's doable.

edit: partially beaten by a few minutes but I'm still relevant.

Enc

How about the future, when I would be ready to upload this nonsense to a website, would it be possible to do without serious issues?

Disrupter

Its not crazy difficult to migrate a wordpress site. However it isnt as simple as just uploading the files. You will have to copy the database. And then also change the wordpress configuration to point to the new url.

Enc

Thanks guys! This is very useful.

amateurhour

Are you putting this on a home server or just building it on your home PC? I only ask because if you live in an area where you're getting the big time cable internet speeds and you're running a server you can just host it from your house. Just request a static IP from your provider if they offer it without upgrading to business class internet. (I think Time Warner and Charter still do and it's like $5 a month, but Comcast doesn't offer that anymore)

It would easily hold you over until you start getting popular, and in the meantime you can make a few bucks hosting sites for friends too, however most cable providers kind of frown on that.

Enc

amateurhour wrote:

Are you putting this on a home server or just building it on your home PC? I only ask because if you live in an area where you're getting the big time cable internet speeds and you're running a server you can just host it from your house. Just request a static IP from your provider if they offer it without upgrading to business class internet. (I think Time Warner and Charter still do and it's like $5 a month, but Comcast doesn't offer that anymore)

It would easily hold you over until you start getting popular, and in the meantime you can make a few bucks hosting sites for friends too, however most cable providers kind of frown on that.

Mostly I just want to hold of on having it published visibly until I have sufficient materials for a first issue, ideally without paying monthly fees to build through a host as it may be several months from when I start to when the site is close to going up. Hosting on a PC was the plan if I could later upload without serious headaches. Now I'm considering some other options, that included.

Seguer

Disrupter wrote:

Its not crazy difficult to migrate a wordpress site. However it isnt as simple as just uploading the files. You will have to copy the database. And then also change the wordpress configuration to point to the new url.

It is more involved than this.

You will need to make sure that any inter-page links are going to the new, correct, URL. Just updating the WP Setting in the Admin will not do it.

My process to migrate is usually:

1. Database dump "from"
2. Find/replace old URL with new URL
3. Import find/replaced sql into new database

(upload files also somewhere in the process)

NOTE: Some plugins are bad, and serialise data to the database instead of storing data normally. If you use any of these they will break when doing the find and replace if they use the site url in there anywhere. You'll need to export their settings and import them, assuming that the plugin itself has a way of doing them.

TychoCelchuuu

If you make them all relative links in the first place you'll save yourself some headaches.

Seguer

Except WordPress by default doesn't do that ;-)

Disrupter

Well, yeah but thats more the design of the site. You would have to use wordpress functions when linking to properly get the wordpress url. But you pretty much should always build a site so it can be moved easily. ANY website would have issues with moving it under thise circumstances.