Are you not sure about certain things that WordPress plugins or themes are doing? Want to try it out on a dummy to see whether things are working the way you like? Well, the first thing that could come to your mind would be either to set your site unto maintainance mode and do the experiment or create a dummy blog on your webserver. But why waste all the resources speed and bandwith when there is a local alternative you can grab to?

Don’t you know that you can install WordPress locally now too? Yes, you’ve heard it right, WordPress on your local Windows XP machine that you are using to browse the web and doing other activities with. I’m glad to help you out install the software locally, so that you can make your own test run now!

First before anything else, make sure that you have the XAMPP lite software installed on your computer, else this cannot succeed, it’s a very vital application that you need in order to get things going. Reminder: Choose the .EXE one.

Please be reminded to install the software on your drive C root! It must be in the root folder of all your files, it should look like this:

After the installation has succeded, enter that particular folder, and click twice on setup_xampp.bat. You should then see the following (don’t mind what’s written on mine, because I have it installed already):

After the above task has finished, proceed with clicking the xampp-control.exe twice. You should see the following screenshot below. Please click on Start besides the Apache and MySql:

Now use your favorite web browser and point to http://localhost/ from the given menu, select the desired language that you wish to use.

On the left bottom corner of the screen, you’ll see a link that is named phpadmin, click on that link now, which will open the usual phpadmin we all know from the real web hosting we are using, as the browser will lead you to the phpadmin page, create a new database and name it “wordpress” of course without the quotes, it should look like this:

So, all major tasks have been accomplished now. Next thing that you should do is to point your browser to http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php and follow the instructions given.

Input the following data on the requested fields:

• database name: wordpress
• database user: root
• database password: leave it blank
• other options don’t need to be touched

I believe you know that particular installation process, after completing the task, you will finally see your output, a local copy WordPress on your computer!

Could that have been easier? :p

Oh, and don’t forget to leave comments below 🙂