WordPress is one of the most popular Content Management Systems (CMS) on the Internet today, but doing Research and Development (R&D) work on the platform can be problematic at best. The reason being is any R&D that you do on a Live WordPress platform has a potential risk of bringing your website down. So, what do you do if you want to create a new theme or test a new plugin to see if it meets your needs?

Well, you can install WordPress locally on your Apple Mac so that you can play around with the platform to your heart’s content. Luckily, there is a solution available where you don’t need to install and configure the Apache, PHP and MySQL packages on your Mac.

Process

1. To begin with, you need to download the WordPress CMS and an application called MAMP. MAMP or ‘Macintosh, Apache, MySQL and PHP’ is an all-in-one application solution where it turns your Apple Mac into a local ‘web server’. Like what the name says, it provides the three most popular open source software applications for your Mac. No installation or configuration of Apache, MySQL and PHP is needed.

2. Once the MAMP application has downloaded, open the .dmg file and drag the MAMP folder to your application folder. For convenience, you should also place the MAMP icon in your Dock (it’s inside the MAMP folder). Double-click the MAMP application to start the web services. When all the green lights in the Status window appear, your Mac is now a local web server. A web browser should also automatically launch displaying the ‘Start page’ for MAMP. This is where you control the MySQL and PHP functions, we come to those later.

3. Locate a folder called ‘htdocs’ inside the MAMP folder. This is where you place files that you want to excute on your local web server. Unzip the WordPress ZIP file that you downloaded earlier and move or copy the files from within the WordPress folder to the ‘htdocs’ folder.

4. OK, your local web server is now up and running, the WordPress files are installed, all you need to do now is create a MySQL database for WordPress and you are done. This is the hardest part to accomplish, but follow these instructions and you will be fine. You need to go to the MAMP ‘Start Page’ web page; launch the MAMP application and click the ‘Open start page’ button (if you already don’t have it open from Step 2). Click the ‘phpMyAdmin’ navigation button which enters you to the MySQL administration screen. Find the ‘Create new database’ field and enter a name for the WordPress database. In this tutorial, I’ve called it ‘wordpressdb’.

Click the ‘Create’ button. You should get a confirmation message saying that the database has been created. Don’t worry about creating tables for the database, the WordPress set up procedure will do that for you.

5. Go to your web browser and type ‘http://localhost:8888/‘ into the address bar.

6. You should get an error saying that the WordPress configuration file hasn’t been set up and you need to create one. Luckily, there is a sample given within the WordPress download. Go to the ‘htdocs’ folder within the MAMP folder and find the ‘wp-config-sample.php’ file. Right-click on the file and select ‘Open With’ and then select the Text Edit application. The PHP file should open in Text Edit. You can use any other text editor of your choosing if you wish.

7. Within the PHP file, you need to enter some details that enables WordPress to find and access the database that you’ve just created in Step 4. The database name, as given in this tutorial, is ‘wordpressdb’, and the user name and password by default for MAMP is ‘root’ (yes, they are same for both). So, within the PHP file:

• replace ‘putyourdbnamehere’ with ‘wordpressdb’,
• replace ‘usernamehere’ with ‘root’
• replace ‘yourpasswordhere’ with ‘root’

Once you have done that, select Save As… and save as ‘wp-content.php’ making sure that the file is being saved in the ‘htdocs’ folder. You should have some similar as the screenshot below:

8. Go back to your web browser and go to ‘http://localhost:8888/‘. As you can see, WordPress has been installed and is up and running. All you need to do now is go through the normal final set up procedure and that’s it, WordPress is installed locally on your Mac.

Notes

• MAMP does not start up automatically when you log in; you need to start the services each time. You can place the MAMP application in your Login items if you wish.

* Special thanks goes to James for discovering MAMP for me, and this tutorial is dedicated to Heidi P.

Although MacOS X is an extremely secure operating system from hackers when you are using the Internet, the physical computer itself is not that secure. Files can be easily transferred off your Mac if someone has direct access to your machine and also if they have with them another Mac computer and a Firewire cable.

So, how do you secure your files? How can you secure your files so that only you can access to them? Fear not. MacOS X gives you the tools or tool in this tutorial, to do this “right out the box” as Steve Jobs often says. In this tutorial, I will show you how to create a secure directory, so that you can place your important files and other related documents securely away.

You can instead, if you wish, encrypt your entire home directory using FileVault; this function is located in the Security System Preference. Personally, I see some disadvantages with using FileVault, the biggest being that you are unable to store your encrypted files on a memory key for added security, more on that later.

Process

1. The tool that we are going to use, to create a secure directory, is called Disk Utility. It is located in the Applications > Utilities folder. We don’t actually create a secure directory as per say, but more a ‘virtual’ directory. In fact we create an encrypted disk image volume where we can save the files and documents we want to secure away. It’s the same principle as File Vault, but you have more control.

2. Launch the Disk Utility application if you haven’t done so already. We use this application to create a new disk volume image. Click on ‘New Image’ in the toolbar.

3. You will be presented with the usual ‘Save As’ dialog box, but with a few added options. Save the image something like “Important Files” and select where you would like to save the image.

4. There are various options to choose from. The first one, Volume Name, is what you would like the volume to be called when you mount the disk image, name this whatever you like. Volume Size is the size of the image that you would like to create. For added security, you can save the image on a memory stick later and keep in a safe place. Select a size that suits your needs. If you run out of room in the image, you will have to create a larger image at a later date. Volume Format you should leave as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) unless there is a specific reason why you should choose another.

5. The next option is Encryption. As stated in the application, you can choose 256-Bit encryption if you wish, but it will be slower. Pick the one that suits you best.

6. The last two options, Partitions should read ‘Single partition – Apple Partition Map’ and Image Format should read ‘read/write disk image’. This makes you able to read and write files to the image file. You should have a dialog box similar to the one below in the image:

7. When you are happy with your settings, click Create. Because we choose to encrypt the image, Disk Utility will ask you for a password. Insert a password that is going to be strong as displayed by the password strength indicator.

DO NOT FORGET YOUR PASSWORD!!! If you forget your password, tuff. There is no way of retrieving the data; it’s gone, it’s lost, it’s gone the way of the bit, bye bye, you’re SOL (shit out of luck). So choose a password carefully, but not stupidly, like your middle name etc.

Also, make sure that the check box for the ‘Remember password in my keychain’ is UNCHECKED (why this feature is here I’ll never know). We don’t want the password being stored on your computer.

8. Once you clicked ‘OK’, the disk image will be saved to your computer to the location that you specified earlier and the virtual disk will mount on your Desktop ready for use. Then it’s just a simple process of copying the files that you want to secure away on to the virtual disk. Once you have copied the files over, you can delete the originals off your hard disk.

9. When you have finished, drag the virtual disk to the trash to ‘eject’ the disk, therefore unmounting the image.

10. When you want to use the virtual disk again, just double-click the image. It will ask you for the password for the image. Once successful, the virtual disk will then mount on your Desktop as before.

11. For added security, you could save the disk image on to a memory stick. Then you can store the memory stick somewhere that is not near your computer and only insert the memory stick when you want to access your files.