Leafing through the pages of the May edition of PC Plus magazine, I came across a little article about WAMPs.

WAMPs are independently-created programs that can be installed on Microsoft Windows based computers.  The acronym is formed from the initials of Windows and the package’s principal components, namely: Apache, MySQL and PHP.

By installing a WAMP on my computer, I would have all the necessary components to enable me to run WordPress locally.  I thought, this would be ideal for developing WordPress themes without the need to constantly upload changes to the Web for testing on a published site.

I therefore downloaded WampServer 2, an open source WAMP, free to use under the terms of a GPL licence.  I was impressed with the ease of installation (I’m sure it would be much more of a hassle to download and install the components individually) and once installed, it was also easy to get WordPress 2.5 running locally on my laptop. I think I’ll do the same on my desktop PC.

From now on it should be much easier to work with WordPress files and themes. I’ll only have to upload the files to the web once after they’ve been fully tested on one of my new development servers!