Running and Reviewing WordPress 2.5-beta1

WordPress 2.5 is set to release this month, March 2008, so I decided to jump in a bit early by installing and running it on my PC to see what’s new and exciting. I know it’s been reviewed here and there, and some sites are setup so you can go try it out yourself, but there’s nothing like being able to set it up on your own machine and “kick the tires.”Here’s what we need to do:

1. Install xampp on our local PC
2. Get Subversion
3. Retrieve WordPress 2.5 via Subversion
4. Copy WordPress 2.5 to the appropriate folder under xampp
5. Run WordPress 2.5 and have fun reviewing what it looks like and how it acts.

That’s it!! Just that easy. 😉

Ok, let’s really walk through all this. I use VMware Workstation as discussed in my previous post How To Run Multiple Operating Systems On One Computer. I’ll be running Windows XP in a VM with xampp and WordPress 2.5 installed. Now this isn’t the only way to run WordPress 2.5 in a test environment as you’ll see. But for now, I like to use VMware Workstation to run a lot of test environments.

Another way to run WordPress 2.5 locally, if you don’t have VMware Workstation, or you don’t want to use a VM, is to install xampp locally on your PC. You can read about xampp in my blog post here and download xampp here.

Step 1 – Install xampp

If you have xampp installed already on your PC, you can skip this step. Since I’ve already written about xampp in the above post I’ll quickly describe how to set it up since this post is all about getting WordPress 2.5 up and running.

1. Download xampp and install to your c: drive so you end up with c:\xampp
2. Run c:\xampp\setup_xampp.bat
3. Run c:\xampp\xampp-control.exe
4. Start Apache
5. Start MySql

Step 2 – Get Subversion

Subversion is a tool to track versions of WordPress or any othere software system. But for now, all you care about is getting it by downloading it here, then installing it and retrieving WordPress 2.5. If you install the Windows version of Subversion, you’ll be ready to retrieve the latest build of WordPress 2.5.

Step 3 – Retrieve WordPress 2.5

Here are the commands you run at a DOS Command Prompt. You can open up a DOS Command Prompt by going to Start->Accessories->Command Prompt in Windows XP. This will open up a DOS window in the Document and Settings\<userid>. When you run the following command WordPress 2.5 will be retrieved to a folder called trunk.

svn co http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/trunk/

Step 4 – Copy WordPress 2.5

Rename trunk to wordpress25 and move the whole folder to c:\xampp\htdocs so it looks like c:\xampp\htdocs\wordpress25.

Now, from the previous tutorial on running xampp, copy the file c:\xampp\htdocs\wordpress25\wp-config-sample.php to wp-config.php. Edit the file and put the name of the database you created above, which should be wordpress25. Enter the DB_USER as root and make sure the DB_PASSWORD is blank – ”. Save the file.

Step 5 – Run and Review WordPress 2.5

Now, you’ll browse to http://localhost/wordpress25 and everything should run correctly and you should see the following screen.

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Here’s the new Dashboard.

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Here’s the editor.

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Running Multiple Versions of WordPress

If you also have WordPress installed on your computer in a folder called wordpress, that’s fine. Once you’ve downloaded WordPress 2.5 you can create a new folder under htdocs called wordpress25 and put all the new files for WordPress 2.5 there. This will keep your current version and the new wordpress 2.5 version separate so they don’t bang into each other.

For example, let’s say you already have WordPress 2.3.3 installed and now you want to install WordPress 2.5, you would create a new database called wordpress25 and that will keep things separate. So now you have a database called wordpress for your WordPress 2.3.3 installation and a database called wordpress25 for WordPress 2.5. You should be good to go with both versions running side by side and they won’t bang into each other.

Once everything is running you’ll be able to browse to http://localhost/wordpress for your WordPress 2.3.3 version and http://localhost/wordpress25 for your WordPress 2.5 version.