How to fix WordPress automatic upgrades and plugin installs on XAMPP
If you’ve ever had problems with WordPress automatic updates on a local install of XAMPP this should fix it (note that I’ve tested it on OSX but it should work for Windows/Linux but the details will be different). For a long time I just did the updates/installs by manually installing because the automatic upgrades never worked or it would ask for my ftp details. And no matter what ftp details I entered it would never connect. Same for plugin installs or updates. Turns out that it has nothing to do with ftp settings, it was a simple file permissions conflict. XAMPP was running its local Apache as user ‘nobody’ while the files on my hard disk were owned by my local user ‘ian’. When WordPress came across this conflict it...
How to create a single wp-config file for local and remote WordPress development
If you are developing WordPress sites, themes or plugins, you probably know that setting up a local development environment can speed things up immensely. The easiest way is to use XAMPP or MAMP. I prefer XAMPP by the way as it is available on Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. Installing XAMPP gets you most of the way to headache free WordPress development, the rest is setting up your local server/virtual servers so that it as closely mirrors your remote set-up as possible. However, some settings like blog address are held in the database which makes mirroring local development and remote production servers a little tricky. If you just backed up the database on the remote set-up and imported it to your local XAMPP server through phpMyAdmin then WordPress will still...