WordPress Development Environment

Get introduced to the dependencies needed for this course.

We'll cover the following

WordPress is an open-source content management system (CMS) used for creating websites. WordPress was created in 2003 and, in the past two decades, has gained huge popularity by being the powerhouse behind more than 40% of all websites on the internet. Initially used to create blogs, WordPress features a huge number of plugins, which makes it a suitable platform for creating any type of website like blogs, e-commerce stores, portfolios, social networks, etc. In this course, we will create a website using WordPress.

Local development environment

Websites are developed in a local environment, which saves the trouble of pushing any changes made to the website to a web hosting server. We will be working with our personal copy of the website that resides on the Educative platform.

WordPress requirements

To run WordPress, the web host should provide support for PHP, MySQL or MariaDB, and Apache or Nginx. If we are to work locally on our machine, we need to install these components for WordPress to work. Luckily, multiple tools are available, which take care of the installation process. Some of the most popular tools are listed below:

  • LOCAL

  • DevKinsta, which supports integration with the Kinsta hosting

  • XAMPP

  • MAMP

There are many other options, including AMPPS, Vagrant, Bitnami WordPress, and DesktopServer.

We recommend using LOCAL for WordPress development on your local machine. However, any of the other tools listed above can be used too. Check the Installing Local lesson for a step-by-step tutorial to install Local.

After installing Local, consider installing VS Code by following the steps in the Installing VS Code lesson. This is an optional step as any other code editor can also be used. However, VS Code offers a built-in command line interface that comes in handy in later sections of the course.

Note: To run a WordPress application on Educative, you do not need to set anything up. We have got you covered and installed all the dependencies for you. Just press the "Run" button, and your WordPress app will run inside the special environment within the browser.