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WordPress is one of the most popular Content Management Systems (CMS) on the Web today, but doing Research and Development (R&D) 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 Mac so that you can play around with the platform to your heart’s content. Luckily, there is a solution where you don’t need to install and configure the Apache, PHP and MySQL packages on your Mac.

Setting up WordPress locally on your Mac tutorial

I can’t believe that it has taken me so long to discover WordPress! What an excellent piece of software, and the beautiful thing is, it’s absolutely FREE!

So, what is WordPress exactly? WordPress is a Content Management System (CMS) that runs on the open source PHP and MySQL programming languages, hence why it’s free. WordPress is primarily used as a personal blogging tool and is one of the pioneering applications that has spearhead the Web 2.0 movement on the Internet today. So why have I moved to ‘WordPress’?

Well, to be honest there are a few reasons really. One, I wanted a web presence that is easy to create, maintain and customise without the need of mucking with XHTML and CSS. Two, I wanted a web system that I could access anywhere in the world and three, I wanted automation in regards to tags, RSS etc. WordPress fitted the answer.

Initially, the package looks difficult to use and set up, but surprisingly it is easy to use. Setting up was relatively easy I have to admit. All you need is a hosting account that offers PHP and MySQL, luckily my current ISP does, but at a slight cost.

Once I had the server side setup, logging on was relatively easy. Unfortunately, the WordPress website doesn’t offer a whole PDF manual from what I could see. The manual is all HTML base, so I purchased the Quickstart Guide to WordPress 2 and it has helped out tremendously.

At the moment, there is a serve lack of content, but I hope to populate this site with the old very soon.

Thanks for reading.