WordPress has been the most powerful and popular content management system among website developers. Mainly, WordPress owes its popularity to its ultimate flexibility for customization. Offering a wide variety of themes and plugins, WordPress has become the top priority of enterprises and developers. Besides customization, it also offers you an option to set up a development environment. WordPress development environment refers to a set of tools that allows you to safely test the impact and functionality of your changes before going live. In addition, there may be remotely hosted or local WordPress development tools for the development environment.
A remote or hosted environment is hosted on servers; you can easily share your development site among clients and collaborators anywhere in the world. In comparison with the local environment hosted environment allows you to set up your third-party services and integrations easily. On the contrary, the local WordPress environment is set up just on your PC, and it cannot be accessed online by any visitor or client. Therefore, local WordPress development tools for the environment makes an amazing choice for WordPress development services. Furthermore, it is fast because you don’t need hosting with the local environment and the code editing files reside on your computer.
Why do we need a development environment?
Why would a WordPress Development Agency need the development environment is a valid question if you are wondering. It is important even for an agency teamed up with highly skilled professional developers, Navicosoft. The development environment provides the developer with a private and safe space where one can easily code the modifications and edit the website without getting live. Making changes to a live website is the perfect recipe for a blunder. If it doesn’t go the right way as you expected, your website won’t work properly, and your visitors will surely notice the issue. Consequently, you may lose your traffic until the issue resolve that emphasizes the need for local WordPress development tools.
Tools for local WordPress Development
Here, we shall be digging into the top five tools for the local environment recommended by the top-notch WordPress Development Agency. We shall be focusing on the ease to use, features, and price range. Hence, you can choose the tool suitable for your need and choice. The tools we shall be covering are as follows:
- Desktop server
- XAMPP
- MAMP
Desktop server
If you are looking for super simple and reliable tools to work with, the desktop server is the best choice for you. Even though you can have the free version, you will have to pay $99.95 per year to enjoy the premium version. The desktop server gives you a wizard to set up the local WordPress site. With a desktop server, you can duplicate or delete your websites at any time. It supports MySQL, Apache, and PHP 5.5. Moreover, you can map the domain to your local site.
XAMPP
The tool offers you full control over stack components compared with other local WordPress development tools. XAMPP stands for Apache, MariaDB, PHP, and Perl, which means it contains all that need to run WordPress. You can have two versions; regular XAMPP for Linux-based systems and macOS and XAMPP VM only for macOS. You can set up your WordPress manually or with the help of a standalone installer of your choice. Furthermore, with XAMPP, WordPress Development Services are facilitated with a user-friendly dashboard tool for managing the new services. The most attractive feature of XAMPP is that it is a completely open-source package, a perfect choice for starters.
MAMP
Like XAMP, MAMP is an acronym of My Apache, MySQL, PHP. With MAMP, you set up the stack, create the database, and manually set up the WordPress. Contrasting to the other local WordPress development tools like XAMPP, MAMP is only available for macOS and Windows. You can use different versions depending upon the PHP release of your choice. MAMP supports additional languages as well, such as Perl and Python. No doubt, MAMP allows restricted control over components of the environment. MAMP offers a free version. However, you can get the premium version for $59 for macOS and Windows.
