Setting up a test website on my home PC

[mercurial]

I am in the process of setting up a website. I had a look around and decided to use Wordpress. My question is, how do I go about setting up the website on my home PC for testing purposes, ie, just to see how it all looks and to check out some other things? The website will consist of images in the form of portfolios, so I just want to see what it will look like and what to change to improve the site's visual aspects etc.

Thanks in advance.

 

[chiskmumellow]

http://tamba2.org.uk/wordpress/xampp/

 

[mercurial]

http://tamba2.org.uk/wordpress/xampp/

Thank you

 

[mh348]

You can also use wamp (similar to xampp)
www.wampserver.com/en/

 

[mercurial]

You can also use wamp (similar to xampp)
www.wampserver.com/en/

I think I actually have that on my PC somewhere yeah, thanks

 

[guest2013-1]

Yes, WAMP would be perfect as it would install Apache which is nice for PHP based stuff.

I think setting up wordpress via WAMP was pretty much the most painless setups I've ever done (and I've done a few where PHP ran with IIS)

I just couldn't get the mod_rewrite to work as per the live server though

 

[evilsee]

also, using dyndns or similar, and port forwarding port 80 to your pc's ip, so you can show others the test version.

I do this for clients, if Im too setup a subdomain and ftp the stuff

 

[mercurial]

I got Wordpress and Joomla installed, but with Wordpress, I just can't edit the layouts to get what I want. Joomla seems more organised but I still need a visual element to design a website, which neither of these can offer me. I tried using this other program that does all the back-end coding, while you do the visual elements. It's a lot like Dreamweaver. Anyway, that program works okay but then there's this stupid option in there that I can't disable, so what happens is that at a certain point, the page gets redirected to some other site. I'm trying to use flash to display my photos and this program has a lovely plugin to do just that. Would a Wordpress plugin work for other things too? Can I use them and include that in my own/any PHP pages?

PS: I'm sure many of you will find creating flash pages quite easily. If you are willing to help me, please PM me

 

[midrange]

Can't say I understand all of that post, but my advice is find a Wordpress theme that you like/is closest to what you want, and then use the NextGen or Galleria (if it's being maintained) plugin to display the portfolio images.

 

[mercurial]

Can't say I understand all of that post, but my advice is find a Wordpress theme that you like/is closest to what you want, and then use the NextGen or Galleria (if it's being maintained) plugin to display the portfolio images.

I can't use it. I need something visual that I can use. Otherwise you get all that blog crap all over the place and I tried to remove it.

 

[Random717]

I can't use it. I need something visual that I can use. Otherwise you get all that blog crap all over the place and I tried to remove it.

You can turn most of the 'features' off with Joomla. Then creating galleries is as simple as installing a plugin and linking to it.

I found this useful when trying to understand how Joomla worked:
http://www.compassdesigns.net/tutorials/17-joomla-tutorials/48-joomla-template-tutorial.html

 

[mercurial]

You can turn most of the 'features' off with Joomla. Then creating galleries is as simple as installing a plugin and linking to it.

I found this useful when trying to understand how Joomla worked:
http://www.compassdesigns.net/tutorials/17-joomla-tutorials/48-joomla-template-tutorial.html

Thanks. I'll take a look.