How to work online and offline ..

I have a working copy of WordPress on-line and also locally but have not been able to successfully synchronize them.

I’m using XAMPP and the friendly people over there say ..

In your path tree on your hosted server my guess is you will not have the wordpress folder as normally you would install to the web root of your server and all the config paths in WordPress use relative paths ie. /wp-admin/install.php

So you can’t use this path in XAMPP to go to /wp-admin/install.php which equates to https://localhost/wp-admin/install.php which does not exists (404 error) – web root (or ServerRoot) is htdocs folder which is / in XAMPP and you have /wordpress/ as your root for WP.

The WP chain of command goes like this:
install.php requires wp-config.php which requires wp-settings.php which contains all the relative path information.
So when you go to https://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php (also note the install.php in the address not just simply install) it tries to find and load the above files but because /wordpress/ is not in the relative path it fails with a 404 not found error in your browser.

Sounds complex because it is when you try and mirror an installation on a hosted Linux Apache server with one in a Windows Apache server.

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Right now I have an almost completed site on-line and would like to work on it locally, so what should be the procedure.

Export database – no problem
Import database – no problem

But which on-line files do I need to download via FTP?
At which stage do I need to export the posts etc from my on-line site to my local one?

And then I’ll need to change the URL to local host and perhps other things, and then when I finish working locally I’ll need to reverse the process.

Is there a link or a sticky to this process somewhere.

Or can somebody explain it and then make a sticky so as not to just help me but others?

thanks,

Mike