Permalinks with XAMPP

I copied my sql database into XAMPP (editing paths where necessary of course), and moved my wp-content folder into my local XAMPP website folder “htdocs/mywebsite/” to replicate it off line.

This is the wrong way to move a WordPress installation to a new domain. You will want to export the online blog and import into a clean local installation. The reason that you will want to import/export is because WordPress stores path + url information in the database. While some of these are easy to change others (like serialized arrays for attachment metadata) are not really meant to be human editable.

Please see the following codex article for details:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Importing_Content#WordPress

Both http://educhalk.org/blog/how-to-copy-your-online-wordpress-blog-to-xampp-on-your-local-computer-or-usb-drive/ and http://www.scyj.be/creating-a-local-copy-of-a-wordpress-blog/ are teaching you the wrong way to move a WordPress installation from one domain to another.

Unable to create directory /Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/htdocs/mywebsite/wp-content/uploads/2009/10. Is its parent directory writable by the server?

The easiest way to get around this is to create a folder here: “your-install-folder/wp-content/uploads/” and set the permissions so that it can be writable.