A Church Website Case Study: Your Local Development Environment [Series]

Every now and again a coding horror story pops up on the web. One where someone has one character wrong and so it ends up deleting everything on the system, or takes a whole site down and so on.

It seems so silly until it happens to you one day.

That’s why a local development environment is so important. You don’t want to make a huge mistake and lose everything.

My Mistake

As I was developing our site, I wanted to try out some plugins and themes to see how they would work. I was aware that this could cause issues so I wanted to do the right thing and make a copy of my site to work on locally on my MacBook Pro (like a good web designer). As I’ve mentioned before, our site is multilingual in Polish and English but what I haven’t mentioned is that our web host is in Polish as we are based in Poland. My Polish is okay, but it’s not that great (Hey! It’s a very difficult language). To make matters worse, our web host has a very…uh…interesting backend.

So as I was searching to log into our backend and manage our database so I could make a backup copy, I ended up pressing a button which I thought was “enter”…it turned out to be “delete”.

That’s right. I deleted our database.

Yup, in trying to make a backup of our database in case I did something wrong…I did something wrong and deleted our database. Fortunately our web host had an automatic backup which we could restore, but it really reinforced the lesson of working in a local environment.

Useful Links on A WordPress Local Development Environment

• Learn about setting up a local development environment from Tom MacFarlin
• Set up a local development environment on your Mac
• Set up a local development environment on your PC
• Copy your live website to your local development environment
• Move your local development environment live

Have you got a web development horror story?

Share it below.

Chris Wilson

Senior Staff writer, holder of the keys to the newsletter and writer of app reviews

I'm an English language teacher based in Krakow, Poland, writer, web designer and photographer. Get a free set of Stock bible photos here. Get "The Vital Church Website Checklist".