By distribute, do you mean distribute other complete installations or just distribute stuff that can be uploaded and installed elsewhere?
If you want it to be totally portable and easy to distribute, you’d need to find a portable version of MySQL, PHP, Apache, etc. and load them on to the thumb drive. Then, you could just install and configure your WordPress installation like you’d expect and it would be relatively easy to do.
If you want it to be a little bit less out of the box, you could set it all up, zip the files, and include a database export. The new user would then need to import the database and upload the files and would be ready to go.
Hopefully that helps.
Is this feasible? possible at all?
Sure it is. I’ve done it many times
1) Download XAMPP for Windows to your USB drive
2) follow instructions for setting it up
3) Include the SQL, theme and plugins used for the site.
4) Test it
5) Then copy the whole working installation in USB drive to other USB drives for distribution 🙂
For MAMP on Macs – check this out
Thread Starter
benjiw
(@benjiw)
Wow — awesome you guys, thanks very much.
I guess the only part I’m missing is how to get the wordpress installation that’s on the Web server into the XAMPP installation. Can I just copy the entire Web directory and somehow backup the MySQL database then import it into XAMPP?
Thanks again.
Can I just copy the entire Web directory and somehow backup the MySQL database then import it into XAMPP?
Sure, but you would have to change wp-config.php database info as it would be different in your XAMPP install plus, if you haven’t yet, download and install latest WordPress version in XAMPP
Edit – you would have to change info/url from SQL just like when you are moving WP online. SO, you might want to export XML from your install and import XML into XAMPP instead of SQL so it would be easier.
