One of the easiest ways of editing and making changes to a Wordpress site is to have a local copy on your hard-drive. This can solve the problem of editing and also serves to backup your site extremely easily.
You only need two things to do this successfully, Wordpress and Xampplite.
Step 1: Grab the files you need. Wordpress download. Xampplite for Windows download. Note; I use the lite version (because of its smaller size); you may use any version you wish. Also feel free to experiment with this method on Linux and Mac OS X (I also use Xampplite on my G4 Powerbook).
Step 2: Install Xampplite start-up the services and setup the database. I name my database ‘wordpress’, you’ll also want to add a different user as ‘root’ has no password and should be secured.
Step 3: Install Wordpress. You should make a folder in \xampplite\htdocs for your local files. I use \xampplite\htdocs\wordpress, so the URL for this is http://localhost/wordpress.
Ah the famous 5 minute install, luckily we’ve already done a few of the steps when we setup the database, so in fact it should only take around 3 minutes. Now you should be ready to go. Import any current posts, themes and plug-ins from your website and get tweaking!
