Installing WordPress for Local Development

So far, we’ve covered some things all of which lead us in setting up our local development environment. If you’ve not yet caught up, I recommend reading the previous articles:

In the final article, I state the following:

Next, it’s time to get WordPress installed. It’s extremely easy, so if you’ve come this far, I’d state with confidence that the toughest part is over.

This is usually the easiest part (really), but there are two ways in which you can manage this, and I’m going to cover both. For those curious, it breaks down like this:

installing the latest stable version of WordPress,
installing the most recent nightly build of WordPress

There are reasons that you may want to use one versus the other. I tend to favor the latter when building out my own solutions for reasons I’ll cover later in the article but note that both of the above are covered in this post.

So with that said, let’s get started.

Pre-Emptively Writing Safe Code

In the next set of posts, we’re going to look at tools and plugins that make it much easier to work with WordPress while writing code. That is, these tools will help you catch errors and problems in your code before you have to start debugging through proper tools like Xdebug.

Consider it a pre-emptive layer of protection before needing to do some real debugging work to ensure that you’ve done all you can to prepare for larger issues that you may have otherwise missed.