I have a personal copy of WordPress on my home dev system. That gives you flexibility to try a lot of different code changes without impacting your main site.
Having a theme preview plugin would be cool when not working with core code or plugins.
I have done the local install (google urban giraffe, he has a great tutorial). But I also installed a second copy of wordpress in a separate folder online (called “test”) where I uploaded the new theme with all the same plugins, a few sample posts so I could see exactly how it would look on the “real” site.
This is what I use (http://www.tamba2.org.uk/wordpress/usb/), which puts a “live” site on a USB thumb drive which you can use on whatever computer you plug it into. I do all my experimenting and changes with it before tranferring it to my main site. Hope this helps.
That sounds like a great idea, but I am not sure how you do this. Is this a local install that runs off the USB Thumb Drive?
Jane: Yes. I’ve been using it for awhile. Great for testing changes and I like being able to just stick it into another PC and show someone the/a site…
(Based on WOS)
I don’t know what WOS means, but I am all for this type of thing. I have a laptop and desktop and keeping the “changes” synced is a bit difficult. Do I use wamp or the xamp? Does it matter?
WOS == webserver on (a) stick
I saw a commercial WOS and one that you do yourself. If I get a commercial one, does anyone have recommendations?
I used http://www.chsoftware.net/en/useware/wos/wos.htm and it was so simple I was a bit boggled (of course, I should mention I actually followed the directions). Was a lot easier then setting up WP on my ‘real’ host ;’)
I just followed the instructions at the link provided in my post above and had no problems. The interesting thing about this approach is you can take your thumb drive to another’s computer (such as a client) and run WP just like a “live” site, viewing and interacting with it through a browser on their machine.
