RossMitchell

What you want is certainly possible, however I question the wisdom of hosting a public facing server on your own network.
Congratulations for getting so far.

This is a short term solution.
Say that at the moment that your ISP has assigned ip address “w.x.y.z” to your modem/router.
In your “hosts” file, details here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hosts_(file)
add two lines like:

w.x.y.z mydomainname.com
w.x.y.z www.mydomainname.com

This works because most web browsers consult the hosts file before using the DNS system to resolve a name to an address, if you are using one of the browsers that don’t do this you are out of luck.

You will have to edit these lines every time your ISP changes your assigned ip.

Longer term you will need one of the dynamic dns solutions. Some routers provide support for this.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 5 months ago by RossMitchell. Reason: clarification

Suggest that you try and install a theme manually. That is:
– download the theme .zip file
– extract it on your own computer
– upload it to your hosting using FTP, possibly FILEZILLA
– login as administrator on your WordPress and activate the theme.

Reasons that the WordPress is unable to install its own new themes include having the wrong file and directory permissions.

First get into your browser’s browser inspector and look into your footer section.
You will find a widget area which will be easy to customise.
You will also find a “class-info” classed div that has your homepage link and an empty link too.
If you create a child theme you will be able to customise the footer section.
On the other hand you could seek support from the theme authors.

Since you are on localhost, the network traffic is not going through the router, it can be discounted as not relevant.
What else have you changed in your website hosting configuration ? Especially the apache site configuration.
Your wordpress installs each contain a “readme.html” file, concentrate on getting it to display correctly at this stage before working on the WordPress configuration.

Hello stepdrz,
What are your “site address” and “WordPress address” in your website ?
Chances are that they are some variation on “localhost”, which works fine for the ubuntu machine, but does not work across a network.
Use your browser inspector on your Windows machine, look at the url and address where the browser is expected to fetch the CSS file from. Suggest that you change the “site address” and “WordPress address” to use the assigned IP.

Very likely it is that your WordPress address and Site Address do not match your Apache web server configuration, hence the browser is unable to fetch the CSS file.
Use your browser inspector to view the page header in your site, check that the address given for the css file works.

I have done this many times on different projects.
Other approaches are:
– Add custom page templates to your theme, in these you can write your own PHP code, populate forms and put templates behind submit buttons to update databases. OR use AJAX to stream updates to database tables.
– Write a plugin that registers shortcodes. The shortcodes do what was described above.
OR combinations of the two.
I found this plugin helpful in developing my ideas:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-csv-to-database/

• This reply was modified 5 years, 6 months ago by RossMitchell.

That changing permalinks breaks you localhost site is a worry.
Suggest that you check that the apache module “mod_rewrite” is enabled on your localhost.
Save this php page and it will tell you this, and lots more. On localhost this file is safe, but if you ever put it up on accessible hosting make sure it has an obscure name, some of the details it displays could assist a hacker.
PHP file, call it say “LHphpinfo.php”

<?php

phpinfo();

?>

NOTE that there is no carriage return on the last line.