So you want to start creating or editing WordPress themes, but don’t want to break your website?
You need a local development environment!
It’s basically plopping a server on your computer, so you can test things out before putting them on your hosting server. If you want to do much of anything surrounding web development, even playing around with your blogs CSS, this is a must.
I recently made a switch from a Windows environment to OSX and previously used XAMPP (tutorial here). Although I could have done the same again, I had heard some great stuff about MAMP.
So, here’s how to do it!