Hi, Makori. I’m starting out on learning web development as well. Hows yours going? Any advice’s?

I am a developer and am getting serious about developing with WordPress. OOTB Windows OS includes several application servers notably IISExpress and IIS itself. Most of us in the know host a default website in wwwroot and have learned to use the hosts file which allows us to use it as a DNS and host as many websites on the machine as we may wish; all addressable by name from a browser for example http://site1 to give you a cleverly named example. HTTP requests are accessible on Port 80 by default. Similar defaults are used for databases and other protocols we use for web development.

I have discovered that XAMPP hijacks the default ports so our other work is walled off. It pissed me off when I discovered this as I had to waste a lot of time learning and reconfiguring XAMMP assets to leave the defaults alone.

That said I have a recommendation and it is called Microsoft WebMatrix. It installs and configures WordPress lickity split and does not mangle the default pipeline on the Windows machine. It does it all including the transparent installation of MySQL and any required project configurations. WebMatrics provides a management interface to your MySQL databases as well. WebMatrix uses IISExpress as the web application server. Its all built into Windows for us and Web Matrix even includes native support for FTP and Web Deployment to a remote hosting server. Poof! Its done and we can get to the real meat and potatoes of coding for WordPress.

Except I do not use WebMatrix for coding; just the ability to rapidly install, configure and manage as many instances of WordPress projects that I want. The WebMatrix editor is clumsy and a bit buggy here and there. The reason begin its editor is not friendly to PHP. In fact developing with PHP on Windows is not that friendly at all as we have to do real work to setup and learn to use a PHP debugger.

Anyway, once I use WebMatrix to create my WordPress projects I open projects in Visual Studio and as of late Visual Studio Code that is an outstanding editor that caused me to put away Sublime that I actually bough and paid for. Microsoft can be a real friend to developers and getting friendly with WebMatrix 3 (latest and last version I might add so archive your executable installer) is a very smart thing to do for WordPress developers on Windows. No VV, VVV and none of that stuff is even required because again, WebMatrix is a click-click-click lickity-split experience. Try it out and see if you don’t agree…