How do you Test and Upgrade your Blog, without Stress?
I believe every blogger fights with the best way to test and upgrade their blogs, at one point or another. So i m putting up a series of articles on the best practices for managing blogs that i discovered in my career.
The first article in this series is to Setup a Testbed on your local computer, for safely testing changes to your Wordpress Blog. Once you are done testing, you may update your blog with relatively lower stress levels.
These are the steps that we’ll go through to achieve a local version of your blog.
1. Installing WAMPserver on your System
WAMP in Wampserver stands for Windows-Apache-MySQL-PHP, and it provides an easy way to install the whole server environment on your local system. It includes Apache and MySQL servers with PHP support.
You may download Wampserver from here, the site provides easy documentation to download and install it. After installation and running, wampserver will appear as a Speedometer icon in the system tray.
If you can see this icon, you can open your browser and type http://localhost/, it should open the welcome page for your WAMP Installation. If you want to test more, create a simple webpage say hello.html in “c:\wamp\www” directory (if you chose default installation), and then test it using http://localhost/hello.html.
If this works fine, we are through with the first step.
Wampserver Configuration Panel
2. Modifying window’s HOSTs file
Running an application through “localhost” (your system’s default name) is fine, but it doesn’t give you the real feeling. If you are not completely copying the real server your blog is hosted on, you may miss something in testing – and it may come up as an annoying error while updating your actual blog online.
To call your system anything other than “localhost” you need to update the HOSTs file, located in your windows system folder – specifically “C:\windows\System32\drivers\etc“, depending on where your windows is installed. This is a text file, legacy of unix based systems, you may edit it in any text editor of your choice. Lets say your blog’s domain name is “myblog.com” – so you will add a line at the end of this file – given below.
127.0.0.1 localhost 127.0.0.1 www.myblog.com
Once you save it, your system will also be known as “www.myblog.com”. If you try opening it in your browser, your browser should show the Apache’s Welcome page.
3. Creating a Virtual Host in Apache
A Virtual Host is Apache’s term refering to the ability to run multiple domains from a single system – for example you can run – www.myblog.com and www.myblog1.com – both from the same system, with different files. For advanced understanding you may google more on this subject.
But in simple terms you need it, if you are managing multiple blogs. If you skip this step, your wordpress’ installation directory will be “c:/wamp/www”
To create a virtual host you will need to modify your Apache’s configuration files – “C:\wamp\bin\apache\apache2.2.8\conf\httpd.conf” – depending on where you installed your Apache. You can also open this file by left-clicking on the speedometer icon, and selecting “Apache > httpd.conf” option.
And add the following lines:
NameVirtualHost *:80
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin webmaster@dummy-host2.localhost
DocumentRoot "c:/projects/www.myblog.com"
ServerName www.myblog.com
ServerAlias myblog
</VirtualHost>
<Directory "c:/projects/www.myblog.com/">
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride all
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
Make sure that you have the mentioned directory available and accessible. Restarting Apache will make your domain run from the mentioned directory.
The result of this step will be that any html or php files in the “c:/projects/www.myblog.com/”, will be accessible from “http://www.myblog.com/”. This is going to be your wordpress’ installation directory.
You can put more <VirtualHost> and <Directory> entries for more domains you want to manage.
4. Installing Wordpress, themes and plugins
After step 2 or optionally step 3, you need to download and install wordpress from your Installation Directory – Unzip and Copy the wordpress files in this folder.
Before installing Wordpress, you need to create an empty MySQL Database, and probably create a user also. It helps to name the Database as close to what will appear on your actual host. Otherwise while updating on the real server you may need to change the wordpress’ config file.
You can access MySQL through phpMyAdmin – normally this will be available through http://localhost/phpmyadmin, you may again left click on the speedometer icon of Apache and access it directly. Once you have created the Database and respective MySQL user, you can now continue with the wordpress installation through your own domain – http://www.myblog.com. Accessing this url should start wordpress installation, if everything is set alright.
The wordpress’ famous 5-minute install, and updating themes and plug-ins should be familiar to you – for more information you can browse through http://codex.wordpress.org.
5. Testing and Updating your Blog
You may need to perform minor tweaks to match the apache configuration of your server. Most of these are simple like enabling Apache mods, and changing PHP.ini settings. After changing anything in Apache’s configuration, you may need to restart server again. Both of these can be easily done through options in the wampserver.exe.
Updating your blog generally means updating themes and plugins. Editing PHP is easy in any good text editor like editplus or textpad. As soon you save a change you can just refresh the browser to see the change in real-time.
With ease and peace of mind.