Use MAMP To Test WordPress Themes
I’m sure you’ve heard of all the success stories of web developers making careers out of developing WordPress themes. It’s actually not a bad business to be in, especially if you can develop beautiful, useful, responsive WordPress Themes. The problem is, if you’ve never heard of MAMP, then chances are that you are trying to develop your themes on a live site, or you’ve bought and paid for some other type of private testing environment. MAMP is a free application that creates a MySQL database (or as many as you want) and an apache server to simulate live web servers. This is awesome, because now, you can create WordPress themes and immediately test them out, all behind the privacy of your own little server.
In the tutorial video below, I show you how to create a new database in phpMyAdmin. I show you that you can create as many databases as you want, and you can test as many different themes as you want. This makes WordPress Theme and Plugin development quick and easy. All you have to worry about is coding a WordPress theme or plugin, and previewing it in your browsers. You can your work live, and you can tweak things and quickly test them out. I don’t know of anything else out there that is free and as easy as using MAMP. I combine this with Dreamweaver to create my own custom responsive WordPress Themes for clients.
A Couple of Things to Keep In Mind
Because of folder naming parameters, you have to change the WordPress fresh install folder to something different each time. Also, it just makes it easier when working on multiple themes to have the folder named something other than WordPress 11 or 27. If you really get into making themes, after a while you won’t be able to keep them straight.
When you type in the directory, it will be localhost:8888/(your wordpress folder name goes here)/. The create a wp-config screen will come up. Whatever you named your database, that is the name you use for your database in wp-config. Otherwise, it won’t be able to link up properly. The WordPress username and password will be root and root. This is fine, because no one will be accessing this online. If you make your site live, you will be creating more difficult usernames and passwords anyway. When you go to login to the admin area, your url will be: localhost:8888/(your wordpress folder name goes here)/wp-admin. Once you are logged in, you can import xml data from an existing site to test live data, or you can install plugins and edit your own themes and plugins. You’re all set!
