As detailed in my previous post about this specific topic I’m learning php. What this has done is opened my eyes to what the web can be. So I’m going to document what I do on my journey to learn php, primarily to sort out my blog. I know it seems like such an ardous task to have a simple blog. The problem here is I’m not one for having anything simple. I like a challenge and to be honest this is one hell of a challenge. A great deal of the work has been done for me to be honest, all I have to do is learn how to actually work through everything. I’m going to be writing these posts as if it’s a tutorial. I will be updating it and tweaking it as time goes by till I get the absolute perfect blog, at least in my eyes alone. The added bonus is that I can then add something else to the list of things I know how to deal with, and in addition, any new aspects that Wordpress brings out, I’ll be able to deal with, since I feel I’ll be doing this blog thing for a while, I’m pretty lucky to have gotten out of the MT mold pretty sharpish and found something that much more powerful.

Right so what do we know about php?

1. Well it’s a pretty powerful little language.
2. It resides and does stuff on the server side for a website, and is where all the dynamic content happens as it were.
3. You embed it into html tags, so it’s html embedded.
4. It’s an open source language that’s freely available from this website here, php.net.

Now why should we care for Wordpress? Well as far as I can tell, it’s possible to actually set up a server on your local machine, regardless of what your actual machine is or what platform you’re using.

Well you’ve got php but all the other gumph that makes up your server also needs to be downloaded. The good thing is that you can download an installer that does all the setup for you and then you can go ahead and customise it to your hearts content. There are a great many installers out there. Personnaly I’ve gone for XAMPP, you can find it right here, XAMPP

After running the exe for this fantastic bit of software, you go to your route directory and you can actually run the server by clicking on the exe from there, remember not to close it but use the stop xampp button for that action.

Right so far so good, to help you along you can even download the documentation for php as well, it’s all there and you can even download it as a windows help file of sort which is very sweet I thought, get it from here, download docs .

And bang you’re now running a server on you machine. So how does this help me exactly with my Wordpress customisation exactly? Well now you can set up your site on your machine and see if things are working without actually upsetting your installation on your site. You check everything, tweak, whatever and then just upload those files, no fuss, knowing full well everything works exactly the way you want it.