 In theory, there it goes. All right, welcome to How to Set Up a Free Wordpress Test Website. All right, let's get this party started. I'm Sarah Snow. I'm a Florida resident by weekday, traveler by weekend, and for the next two months. I'm a former middle school teacher. You'll obviously see that come out of very bubbly. I'm a parrot and a Sharpay mom, and you will hear barking and tweeting in the background. So one of those work from home problems, cooking, learning languages, and the ocean. I'm also a training team contributor and somewhat of a mad scientist with these types of experiments sponsored by automatic and very lucky there. So yeah, that's me. And let's just talk some quick expectations here. Golden rule, all of these workshops are always respect yourself and everyone in this room. We are all learning together. You may know more than I do. You may have the answer to somebody else's question and you may learn things that you never really expected to learn either. So yeah, so the reason I wanted you to find your chat box is so that you can answer your questions here, ask questions here, and of course, stay respectful. So I typed that as well. So yeah, so this is what I know about setting up a free WordPress installation that you can play with and break and mess with however you would like, but we are learning together. And I really do see you as the source of brilliant information. So this works with kind and deliberate participation. It's gonna be a little bit interactive today. There really aren't wrong ideas. Sometimes we say something and there might be, something might be like concerning about it or whatever, but we like to work through those things and figure out like the right way. So stay curious and patient and this is recording. So for those of you who are new to our workshops, if you go to learn.wordpress.org to find this later and other recorded spaces, you're gonna go to learn.wordpress.org, scroll down to the recent, not tutorials, upcoming online workshops. There's a button here that says view all online workshops and there's another button. This is our calendar for like, ones that are coming up next week and months after, but the view recorded online workshops, this is where this will appear. So you can find that here. I aim to get them up within 24 to 48 hours. Sometimes it takes a little bit longer, but yeah, so you'll find that there. Let's keep going. Oh my goodness. We have somebody in Mongolia today. That is wonderful. I love it when these are so global. So today's agenda, we are going to download and install local though. If you are advanced, there are a couple of other programs which I'll show you known as Shamp or MAMP. You're gonna learn how to set up a test website of your very own and you can have multiple and we're just gonna talk some quick limitations because these set up websites only exist on your computer to start, okay? So what that means is that most things will work, but if there is some like data passing back and forth between servers, so think credit cards, think, I don't know, Jetpack, one of Automatics products only works if you're connected, if that website is connected to the internet. So that's just something to know. We'll talk about it at the end, but first we're gonna head to local by flywheel. So I'm going to drop this into the chat. This is my very favorite, especially if you are a beginner. This is what we are going to be using today. This is a program that you're gonna download to your computer. There's a button right up here. It only requires your email address and I can say that I have not been spammed very much by them or anything like that. So that's really nice, but you can choose Mac, Windows, Linux, whatever you're using, I'm using a Mac. They're just collecting a little bit of information and this is what you need to do in order to get set up with that. Now, if you are a developer and looking into wanting to do more developmental work, I highly recommend using other programs like MAMP or SHAMP. Either one of these will work as well. I'm not as familiar with these as I grow in my, I'm a baby developer right now. I'd like to learn to be a developer. I will probably switch to using those more. But for today's demonstration, we're using local. So go ahead and download this to your computer and start getting that installed. I'm gonna give you a few minutes to do that. I'm gonna show you what it will look like when it's ready. So when you're ready, it's all downloaded, type ready in the chat box. A couple of people have asked some great questions in the chat. So Jerry, if you're just getting started, head to localwp.com. Head, click this download button and get started installing this now. So someone asks, hey, what's the difference between SHAMP and MAMP? You know, the main thing is I believe that SHAMP is completely free and it's open source. I believe yes. So this is an open source product. It's meant to be easy to install and use and it allows you to do quite a bit. There's a great about page over here that you can read a little bit more about it. But basically this is an ability to install specifically an Apache web server and it allows you to do quite a bit there. Whereas MAMP, I don't believe is open source but it is one that many people use as a professional frontend for a classic local server environment. So you can create a separate host for each of your web projects. You can use WordPress. This one also involves the ability to use Drupal, Joomla, things like that. So as far as downloading local, yeah. So the one thing that has to happen here is you do have to fill out this stuff here. Other than that, yeah, this is completely free. There's also something in development that I think you all should be aware of. It's known as the WordPress Playground and it's in beta right now and what it does and what it does is it prepares a WordPress installation just in a browser. So it goes away when you log off but you can see here that I can go and look at a WordPress website here. It is still in beta. So you are welcome to play with this right now but do expect it to like have some glitches like that is expected behavior at this time but that is another way that you can play for free. So if you're over here and you're like, hey, I'm uncomfortable downloading things or giving somebody my information, you're welcome to use this link as well. I see another thought. It's outside the scope and sequence but thank you, Jerry. I appreciate that. Anyway, so you can definitely use WordPress Playground to experiment or if you are just joining us you want to go to localwp.com. I'm adding that to the chat. So if you have a couple of latecomers here, go download it and then go ahead and install it. So are we generally ready to move on to learn how to set up the actual website? Yes, no, maybe so. Are we at the screen with a little bit less on the right here? All right, I see one ready in the chat box. And for those of you who are joining us a little bit on the late side today do know that you can find this recording a little later we're going to keep going. So we're going to be focusing on local by flywheel today. So there are going to be different processes if you're using Shamp or MAP but today we're going to look at this one and for future workshops I may look into using the other ones as well but for today this is what we are using. So in order to get started with a WordPress installation if you vary on you can see you can have more than one. These are all of my test sites that I often use here. You're going to find this little plus sign down here in the corner and it says add local site. So you're going to select the create a new site here which is going to make it just a brand new standard WordPress. This is an advanced feature over here you can create and use blueprints. There's a what's this button if you want to learn about that a little later but for the sake of time to just get set up we're going to click this create a new site button and then continue. So you're going to want to give your website a name so I usually use things like test site or my glorious tester log whatever you want to call it there's no wrong answers. Again this exists solely on your machine at the moment. There are some advanced options down here but don't worry about them to get just keep moving right along once you give it a name click continue. The easiest thing to do now the easiest thing to do now is to select preferred. Again, if you want to get into some more advanced software this custom button might be good but preferred just gets you moving right along and now you have to give this a username and password so I usually use my WordPress username and then you want to give it a password that you remember because this isn't connected to anything password recovery does not work. So give it a password that you are going to remember maybe write it down like a piece of paper or something just because it can be really challenging if you forget. So I'm going to give this a password and when you are done click add site. When you are here, say ready. Just don't want to rush you picking your name and your username and password. When you are at the screen give me a thumbs up emoji type ready. Things like that. Jerry says it's really cool that you can have so many test sites on local it's a great way to get check out themes play with plugins just experiment with things find things and break them without worrying about a live website that you paid for, you know. All right, I'm seeing some thumbs up. Excellent. Okay. So when you're ready the last button you're going to click before you open this up there is this beautiful button here that says one click admin and this basically foregoes the login screen. So the username and password that you put in already this allows you to just click your WP admin button and be taken directly to your dashboard. So next step, click on one click admin then up here to WP admin. And just like that you have your own wordpress test sandbox. So you can install themes for example, so appearance themes. You'll notice that if you click add new it does actually connect to the repository and install that install themes from there. You can play with plugins here. You can head to appearance and editor if you're using the 2023 theme. This is a new block theme. Maybe some of you are seeing this for the first time because I think you may be very familiar with classic themes but you can definitely click around learn, experiment all of that with this. So you now have a test website that you are welcome to play with. Let's talk some limitations here because we did all that. So the only limitations that I know of and if other people are more advanced than I am and no more than I do by all means share them in the chat box but things that pass data across the internet tend to not work. So for example, if you were experimenting with setting up a shop and you wanted to like do a test payment through a payment gateway I don't think that's gonna necessarily work because it's just your computer to your computer. Other certain plugins will require access to the internet in order to work to create backups and things like that like cloud-based backups. So that's Jetpack, right? That's one of automatics. If they're going to create backups it goes to their cloud. It's not able to do that if it's not connected to that cloud. And Jim said, I assume SSL does not function with local life. You know what? I think that's correct. Yeah, I think you would have to be connected to the internet to have an SSL certificate and actually have that on your host. So great call out. Yeah, but let's just double check that. And you can see your website up here. Yeah, there's no SSL there. So yeah, that is, wow that's our quick workshop on how to do that. I hope that you enjoy and experiment and play. Yeah, and so we'll finish this up. I'm gonna stop recording now and I will show you where to find a link to this recording so you can find it in the future. So thank you all. And then just finish this up. Not that one. You can see other work that I've been doing. For other tutorials, live workshops like this one and courses, please visit learn.wordpress.org. 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