Setting up a WordPress Development Environment with MAMP and WordPress

We live in an age where website creation has moved from the sphere of techie web developers and into the soccer mom’s living room. CMS’s like WordPress has made it so easy for users to navigate a website’s backend that anyone with a basic grasp of digital interfaces can create and modify their content. Most people I’ve spoken to can grasp the concepts of basic HTML and CSS quite easily, and actually find it quite gratifying to go tinker in their site’s stylesheets. So when discussing WordPress Development, I find that that creating a local hosting environment is the area least explored by budding developers.

Through experience though, I’ve learnt that spending that extra bit of time in setting up your space at the beginning of a project can save loads of time later on. And so here is a step-by-step guide to getting set-up with MAMP and WordPress.

Good luck and happy WordPress development!

Getting Started With MAMP and WordPress

1. Download the newest version of MAMP (mac users) or WAMP (for Windows users). Double Click the downloaded zip folder in the downloads section on you computer. This should give you a MAMP.pkg file.
2. Double Click this file to open the MAMP installer.
3. Follow the prompts to install MAMP. You will have to type in your Administrator’s Password to allow MAMP to make changes to your settings.
4. Go to your Applications folder and Open the MAMP folder. (Not Mamp Pro). In here you’ll find the MAMP Application. Double Click this to open. This should start up your servers and open up the MAMP welcome screen in your default browser.
5. There will be a link to your PHPmyAdmin page on this welcome screen. Click on it.
6. Go to the database tab and enter a name for your new database and click on create. Remember this name.
7. Click on the home button and go to the USERS tab. Add a new user and fill in the username and password fields. Give this user all available privileges. Write these down and keep them safe as you will need them again. Click on the create button.
8. You will see your newly created user in the Users Overview. Click on the edit icon to the right of your user and scroll down to the ‘Data-Specific Privelages‘. Next to ‘Add privileges on the following database:‘ click on the dropdown and select the name of your database. Now scroll all the way to the bottom of the dialogue box and click on ‘Go’.
9. Now go download the newest version of WordPress here. Unzip the file by Double Clicking on it.
10. Go back to your MAMP Folder in your applications and open the htdocs folder. Create a new folder in here and name it the same as your database. (Any other sites that you create will go in here as well.)
11. Drag the CONTENTS of your unzipped WordPress Folder into this newly created folder.
12. There should be a file in here called wp-config-sample.php. Duplicate this file and rename in it to wp-config.php. Open this up in DreamWeaver or text editor.
13. Fill in your database name between the apostrophes where it says ‘database_name_here’.
    Fill in the word ‘root’ between the apostrophes where it says ‘username_here’.
    Fill in the word ‘root’  between the apostrophes where it says ‘password_here’.
14. Now open a new tab in your web browser and go to the following address: localhost:8888/database name/. There will be a notice about the WordPress 5-minute installation process. Fill in the necessary information here and click on ‘Install WordPress‘
15. Log in to the WordPress dashboard using your selected username and password.

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