In this lesson I'll introduce you to a local development environment that you can use for free.
Specifically designed for Wordpress will set up our first WordPress Web site of the course and start
getting to know it local by flywheel is a free server environment for Wordpress that works well on Windows
and Mac.
You don't need a flywheel hosting account to use it and it allows you to practice and test WordPress
quickly and easily.
By the end of this lesson you'll have a working WordPress Web site you can play with and a fast way
to spin up more.
Let's get started.
First open up a browser and go to local DOT get flywheel dot com.
You'll open this Web site which is the home page for the local bi flywheel development environment and
you can look through all the features and and things about it.
But what I want you to do is click the download button and then choose whether you're on Mac or on Windows
local flywheel works almost exactly the same on both platforms.
Even the file locations are in a very similar location.
So click your platform and fill out your information and click get it now.
Now it's about a half a gigabyte 500 megabytes of a file so it might take a little while but once you
do that double click the install XP file or the install file for your Mac and get it installed plus
a video now and install local buy flywheel and I'll see you back here once you've installed local buy
flywheel.
Go ahead and navigate to the application you're in Windows or on your Mac might be in your applications
folder and when you started it will ask you for some of the default.
You can actually just leave all the settings as is and when you start the actual program it it'll give
you a message that it's starting the local machine.
Now this is a server environment installed on your own personal computer WordPress.
As I went over before needs to have a server as if it were hosted in a live environment.
That means it needs to be able to communicate with a database as well as store files and serve them
to a browser like chrome or Firefox.
Now it usually takes a few minutes to start the local machine and there you go that one for me took
oh what about 25 seconds and you could see that I have a few sites already installed in my local environment.
You won't have any when you first start but down at the bottom left here you can click the plus sign
and click the plus sign and then lets go through the options first.
Choose a name
and the name is fine if you want to look at the advanced options you can and you can specifically choose
the site domain the path where it is located on your computer.
I like to use the default and then creating a site from a blueprint is something that will go over later.
But this I don't have any blueprints created and I will set them up later.
And this just means that you can install WordPress with whatever themes or plug ins you usually use
and it will speed up your development process by using a blueprint to create all your new sites.
So hit the Continue button after you've chosen a name you can choose a custom type of installation with
the HP version the web server and the database My sequel version and if you've set up your defaults
you'll have a preferred version that it will have here.
Let's just go and use the defaults and hit continue and then you're going to be choosing your Wordpress
dashboard username and password specifically for this site.
Again you can set that as something that you always know is the default so that all your local environment
sites can use the same username and password to make it easy for you.
And then there's an email address that you can leave as the default.
And that's something that we'll look at later as well in the advanced options.
It tells you that you can choose this site to be a WordPress multi-site installation which is different
than the single site.
Let's just leave it as a single site by not choosing anything there.
And then you click add site now.
It'll.
It'll open up a special window where you need to give your computer permission to do the things that
local needs to do.
And this is true of other development environments as well.
You're changing some of the very core files in your computer so that you can serve web sites as if there
were a live web server present.
Now once you have this you can see that it's developing.
It's downloading and there it goes it will open up and it will start the site automatically just start
a stop button here by the site name as well as at the top right the stop sign.
And that will be green and have a start button.
If it's not started yet.
Now I'd have my practice site one that I just created selected here and you can see that there's a number
of different options and different features that we can use here.
But for now leave everything at the defaults.
And if you do install more than one site after this it see that each one of these is how you select
it on the left and it gives you the options for each of the sites.
So if you haven't yet stopped the video and go through that process creating your first WordPress site.
Now before we look at any of these features and options for the site in local buy flywheel Let's go
over here to the right.
First of all let's just click View site.
This will open up the site in your default browser and you can see that and opened very quickly.
And if I scroll down this is the default WordPress theme called 20:17 and it comes with a big full screen
image.
The site name is clickable to you rl or your web address.
You can see that mine is called Practice Dasch site Dasch one dot local using dot local.
It is a way that we can develop sites locally and that is not going to conflict with any live domain
that you that your browser might go out and try to get.
This is how local by flywheel sets everything up automatically for you.
And so there is the Web site even we can go through and click on any of the active links you can see
this is the first default post that comes in as well as archives.
And then down here the Metor widget which is on the sidebar is just a default site layout that comes
when you first install WordPress.
Now let's go back to the local buy flywheel interface and then this time let's click admin.
Now this will open the Wordpress administrator dashboard which is always either a log in page has the
W.P. dash log in dot ph P extension and then it redirects to what is the real WordPress dashboard address
which is W.P. dash admin.
So use the log in credentials that you had set up in local by flywheel and click log in.
Whoops got to remember your password.
Of course you can click save in your browser if it prompts you to do that.
And now this is the default WordPress dashboard screen.
There's a welcome screen here that gives you a few different links that you can do usually dismiss that
because this is the real default WordPress dashboard page.
The home page of the Wordpress dashboard the name of your site is at the top left and if you roll over
and click visit site of course it's going to open up the actual site.
I like to keep each of these sites open in a different tab in my browser as I have here so that it's
easy to go back and forth and see my changes.
And you can see that the default the U R L or the address for the Wordpress dashboard is your site domain.
Slash W.P. dash admin and that's all there is to it you already have a fresh clean WordPress installation
here in your local development environment.
You don't have to be on the Internet.
You can use this on a flight or if you're not connected and build and practice WordPress Web sites.
Now if you're back at the local buy flywheel interface just to let you know it does have to be turned
on you can stop the site.
And if your site is not quote unquote running on the web server itself and you go back into your browser
you'll see that if I just refresh that page without the site running it gives me a message local router
error.
This is just telling you that your app the local buy flywheel application which is your wordpress site
is not running and the dashboard page also will not work.
So if you get that message just go back into local and make sure your practice site is running.
Now when you first start and open up the practice site it might take a couple of minutes for it to get
up and running.
But there you go even remember that I was logged in often if I go up here under my username and log
out I can show you that that again is the W.P. log in Dot ph p u r l or web address but if I do want
to just remember W.P. admin for the administrator.
So if I go to that Web site it redirects to the log in page I can click my log in.
I asked my browser to remember my credentials and now I would suggest you just click around a little
bit and get to know WordPress just a little bit if you are connected to the Internet.
We're press now gives you WordPress events and news in one of the widgets on the dashboard here and
it looks at your location if it knows and gives you some information about where press events and news
for you for meetings in your local area as well as local news.
I mean WordPress news right over here and I go back and refresh now that my server is running again
the practice site is live now by default WordPress.
If you're logged in shows you an administrator bar across the top of even the live Web site.
And I like to go in and open my web site dashboard in a different tab.
Like I mentioned one of the things I like to do and this is up to you is go into my own user account
edit my profile.
You can also get that under your profile here on the left side.
And I'd like to uncheck the toolbar checkbox and then save my profile.
Now you'll see when I go back to the live Web site and refresh the page now it doesn't show that administrator
bar and I can see exactly what the public would see if they look at the Web site.
Go ahead and play with it yourself and know that you've got your first WordPress Web site up and running.
Let's get to it in the next few videos.
In this lesson we downloaded and installed local by flywheel.
One of the best local development environments available.
It allows you to create new WordPress installations very quickly for creating new sites to practice
with in the next video.
We'll take a little tour of the Wordpress dashboard and the different pieces that determine what your
web site looks like and what it does.
See there.