Considering a local development server

Maybe you have a PC or Mac-based development server? Here's why you should:

• Develop themes more easily before uploading to the live production server

• Test compatibility of WordPress and plugin upgrades plus new code

• Ultimately, because it's better to screw up a beta site than a live site!

So what sort of local setup is best? There are examples aplenty, XAMPP from Apache Friends being the most easily installed, user-friendly, cross-platform candidate:

• XAMPP – http://www.apachefriends.org

That's a fair bet for most of us with its Apache, MySQL, and PHP configurations largely matching those we can, to a greater or lesser extent, tweak on the live box itself. But what about unmanaged hosting users, who would ideally mimic the remote box locally, as well as for all of us wanting to max out on best security practices for site development? In these cases, setting up just any old local server isn't a bad idea, it just isn't the best idea.

Using a virtual machine

In...