Who doesn't know Wordpress? I think most of the developers know Wordpress. Wordpress is a free, open-source content management system (CMS) used to create and manage websites. It's based on PHP and MySQL, and it provides an easy-to-use interface that allows users to design, publish, and manage web content without needing to know how to code. But in my experience, you still need a little knowledge about coding, especially in CSS and Javascript to make your site better.
Short Story About Wordpress
A short history about Wordpress, WordPress was founded in 2003 by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. It originated as a fork of an existing project called b2/cafelog, developed by Michel Valdrighi. When Valdrighi stopped updating b2, Mullenweg and Little decided to build upon its codebase to create a new platform focused on elegance, web standards, and usability. And until now, around 1/3rd (33.72%) of the top 1 million sites in the world use WordPress (Source).
Introduction to Wordpress Studio
As time goes on, WordPress technology continues to evolve, leading to the creation of WordPress Studio. Yap, we'll talk about Wordpress Studio now. Wordpress Studio is a fast, free way to develop locally with WordPress. Not like the common Wordpress instalation, you can install it as a standalone app. You can download it based on your OS on their website. It's available for Windows and MacOS (Apple Silicon and Intel).
The good fact here, you don't need to setup the dependencies like web servers, MySQL servers, or virtualization technologies to run your Wordpress site. Studio will take care of it and you will see your site installed on localhost in seconds!
Taken from Wordpress.com,
Behind the scenes, Studio uses WordPress Playground, the WebAssembly-powered PHP binary. Thanks to this technology, there is no need to use a traditional web server, making your development experience much quicker and smoother.
This simplify us to setup the Wordpress site, thanks to Wordpress team to make this happened.
Wordpress Site Setup
The first step after app installation is the website setup. You need to enter the Site Name or Import a Backup from your existing Wordpress site.
After you make your site, your website will be ready in seconds, hosted on localhost. The next step is customize your site. You can open your admin site and use it like usual Wordpress site.
To view the URL and what is the user and password to login, you need to go to Settings tab of the Studio, then you will see the Site Name, local URL, local path, username, password, etc. Password is auto generated by default, feel free to change it in the Users page on the Admin site.
Other Features
The one that caught my attention is the Share a Demo Site feature. The goals of this feature is, to show the snapshots of your website to your client, friends, or colleagues, without exposing your localhost with tunnel, let say Ngrok.
This feature require you to have an account in Wordpress.com. It's very simple, you can create an account using email or Gmail account. I think it will setup and sync your local Wordpress site into Wordpress.com, so other people can see your Website on the internet. Yeah, that can reduce the cost to buy a shared or Wordpress hosting to just create a demo website.
As a developer, I also like the Open in VS Code button. This will open the Wordpress files into your VS Code, and you can modify the theme files on your favorite code editor!
Conclusion
Wordpress Studio is a new breakthrough in the world of Wordpress. Easy installation, easy share, and easy modifiy are the words that I can say after try this. I've using Wordpress for some of my works, and I think, Studio is a must if you need to work locally first before host your Website.