Install WordPress In Your Local Computer With XAMPP

Philip Ze — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 08:29:08 +0000

If you’ve been using WordPress to power your blog, you’d probably know that it is very useful to have a copy of WordPress installed in your local computer. It allows you to post a draft copy of your article offline, test & modify your theme or plugins locally before upload to the server.

Setting up WordPress on your local computer is straight forward. All you need is the WordPress itself & XAMPP as a host server. In this article, I show you how to install WordPress on your local computer with XAMPP.

1 Download & Install XAMPP Lite

First, you need to download & install XAMPP Lite. (I recommend the lite version because there are some applications that bundled with the full version which you are hardly need them for normal work. XAMPP Lite is most importantly contains Apache, MySQL & PHP, those three are the one we need.)

Be sure to download the self-extracting archive, it is the easiest way to install XAMPP. Double click the EXE file, choose a directory and click “Install”.

Once the installation is completed, double click the “XAMPP Control Panel” icon to launch XAMPP Control Panel. Next, click “Apache” & “MySql” start buttons to get both applications running.

Now, you need to check whether your Apache local server is running properly. Go to your browser, in the address bar type http://localhost & press enter. If the XAMPP is installed correctly, you will see the default “splash” page as illustrated bellow. Select a language to enter the welcome page.

2 Create The Database For WordPress

Your Apache server & MySql database are now running. Now we need to create a database for your WordPress. Under the Tools menu on the welcome page, click “phpMyAdmin”. Enter “MyWordpress” into the “Create New Database” textbox, make sure “utf8_unicode_ci” is selected & press “Create”.

3 Download & Install WordPress

That’s all for XMAPP. Now, download the latest version of WordPress http://wordpress.org/ (zip file). Extract the WordPress to a new folder (name it as MyWordpress) under the “htdocs” folder where “XMAPP” is installed (default should be at C:\xampplite\htdocs\MyWordpress).

Under the folder, rename the file wp-config-sample.php to wp-config.php. Open & edit the file in Notepad, locate & change the following lines, make sure it is exactly the same as illustrated (database name is ‘MyWordpress’, database username is ‘root’, password is ” & hostname is ‘localhost’).

/** The name of the database for WordPress */
define('DB_NAME', 'MyWordpress');

/** MySQL database username */
define('DB_USER', 'root');

/** MySQL database password */
define('DB_PASSWORD', '');

/** MySQL hostname */
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');

Again, go to your browser, in the address bar type http://localhost/wordpress/ & press enter. Key in a Blog Title, Your E-mail & press “Install WordPress”.

That’s it, your WordPress is now in your locally on your computer & ready to be used . Have fun !

Quick Adsense

Philip Ze — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 15:12:52 +0000

Quick Adsense is an Ads management WordPress plugin. It offers a quicker & flexible way to insert Adsense or any Ads code into a blog post. Besides, it can randomly place the Ads anywhere within a post. It comes with a simple setting page, and it does not overwhelm you with complicated customizable options.

In general, placing Adsense randomly within a post is a good way to experiment a variety of ads formats & placements besides optimizing your Adsense. If you have many regular visitors who frequently revisit your blog, the randomization will likely catch their attention.

Latest Version: 1.6

Here are some features that come with this plugin:

Absolutely NO author revenue reward or revenue sharing from your Adsense or that kind of features.
Default Ads positioning: Assign Ads at the beginning of post, assign Ads at the end of post, assign Ads after certain paragraphs & assign Ads after certain images.
Flexible Ads placement, insert Ads specifically or randomly anywhere within a post.
Simple configuration interface, requires no coding knowledge: Just copy and paste AdSense code, tick & select options, the plugin will then do the rest for you.
Support any Ads code, not limited to Adsense code only.
Display up to a maximum of 10 Ads on a page. Google allows publishers to place up to 3 Adsense for Content on a page. If you are using other Ads, you may display up to 10 Ads.
Support up to a maximum of 10 Ads codes on Sidebar Widgets.
Support up to a maximum of 10 Ads codes for Randomization within a post.
Ads placement on the fly, simply insert , … , , , to a post to accomplish this.
Tags above can be inserted into a post easily via the additional Quicktag Buttons added to the HTML Edit Post SubPanel.

Download

The Quick Overview

Here are the quick overview of the plugin:

Screen shot showing the additional Quicktag Buttons added to the HTML Edit Post SubPanel.

The Settings page from Quick Adsense plugin. There are many ways to configure your Ads display, specifically or randomly as you wish.

Link To TechMilieu.com

If you believe that Quick Adsense plugin is valuable to you, than a link from your blog to http://techmilieu.com/ would be highly appreciated. You can show your support by simply copy one of the HTML code below & paste into your pages. This will help spread the words, thanks.

Text Link : TechMilieu.com
TechMilieu.com

Tiny Button :

The Quick Test Drive

If you have just installed the plugin, you may want to test it up. Here is an illustration that you can follow to have a feel of what Quick Adsense can do for you:

Go to the Plugin setting page & click the Load Default Setting link located at the bottom of the page.
Copy & paste the following Sample Ads1, Ads2, Ads3, Ads4 codes to the Ads textbox respectively, assuming these are your Adsense codes. Do remember to save your changes:
```
Sample Ads1 (250x250)
```
```
Sample Ads2 (234x60)
```
```
Sample Ads3 (200x200)
```
```
Sample Ads4 (120x240)
```
In your post, insert three tags, anywhere within the post (somewhere in the middle is good), use the Quicktag button under the HTML Edit Post Subpanel as you wish.
Now, use the Preview Changes button & see how the SampleAds appear in your post. Remember not to update your post as your live visitors may see this.

Some Thought About This Plugin

Previously, I have written some php codes which allow me to insert Adsense to a post on the fly randomly [ posted to here & here ]. The drawback of this code is that you need to modify the theme template directly for the code to work. A comment from Gossips about this code has inspires me to convert the code into a plugin.

I decided to spend a few hours googling & trying to figure out how to create a WordPress plugin. Surprisingly, I found out that writing a plugin is not as complicated as I thought.

Firstly, I have to decide what the plugin can do for me. I want to create a plugin which allows me to quickly insert Ads code to the post. It must be capable to be random. Using tags to triggle the Ads display is always a good choice. Also, to make it more complete, I want the Ads to be displayed on the Sidebar.

Next, I started to design the plugin Setting page. It took me a while to do this as I wanted it to be as simply as possible, at the same time incorporating all the relevant options. The simpler the Setting page you want it to be, the harder the coding would be.

I thought it was nearly finished but realized that it was just started as the developing of the plugin algorithm was head-cracking. See my entire requirement in the first place; the question is how to make the plugin functions nicely? Well, the php excellent array functions really helped me do most of the jobs. Randomization had been done with just a few lines of code.

I really enjoy creating this plugin. My experience is that once started, it is hard to get it stopped. Please feedback for any bug you might have found, or any suggestion you like to add. Hope this plugin which have benefited me would benefit you as well.

Tech Milieu » Wordpress