Develop Multiple WordPress Sites on Your Mac
If you’ve caught the web development bug, or just have multiple ideas for great website you might want to be able to work on multiple websites at the same time. This is actually really easy to do. If you haven’t read, How to load WordPress on your Mac, read that to learn how to install MAMP on your Mac. If you’ve already read that post this one continues where that one left off.
Here’s the step by step guide on “How to Develop Multiple WordPress Sites on Your Mac”:
Create a new database for your new site
With MAMP open make sure that the serve is running. Look for the two “lights”in the top right of the MAMP window. If the servers are not running push the Start Servers Button.
Click the Open start page button.
On the start page select Tools > phpMyAdmin
Select the Databases tab and in the Create database field ender in a name for your new database.
Create a new folder for your site
Now we need to create a place to put our site files and the WordPress files.
Go back to the MAMP window and select preferences. Make sure that you are on the Apache tab and click on the arrow to be taken to the htdocs folder where your website files will be kept.
In the htdocs folder create a new folder for your new site.
Go back to your original download of WordPress, or re-download WordPress and copy the WordPress files into this new folder. You cannot copy the files from the fist site that we made in the Load WordPress on your Mac, because the WordPress configuration files have been changed to link to the database for that site.
Now that we have a database and the WordPress files in the folder for our site, it is time to link the two of them together.
Open your web browser and go to localhost:8888
There you will see the two folders that are in the htdoc folder
Select the new folder that you just created. In this example “site2”. This will take you to the create a configuration file page.
The next page will remind you of the information that you will need to complete the configuration. Press “Let’s Go!”button.
On the next page enter the information for the database that you just created. In this example the name of the database we created was “site2”. The username for the MySQL database on MAMP is “root”and the default password is also “root”. Click Submit
On the next page click “Run the Install”. WordPress will now be installed.
On the next page give your site a Site Title. Create a username. Remember not to use admin or the name of your site for security reasons. Enter in your email. I would recommend unchecking the “Allow search engines to index this site”check box. It doesn’t really matter since your site is only running on your Mac, but I just like to have this unchecked while I’m developing my site. Remember to turn it on when you move your site to it’s online server.
Log in to your new WordPress site, and your all done! You can now go to //localhost:888 in your browser to select which of the two sites we have installed that you want to work on. You can follow the same procedure to load more sites for development on your mac.
Leave a comment below if you found this tutorial helpful or if you have a question.
Also check out:
How to move your WordPress site the easy way
How to develop your site online with a sub-domain from DreamHost
How to back up your site the easy way
