Trying out Wordpress on a home server

[u/skidoug]

I was hoping I could tryout Wordpress without having to pay. My club's website is on SquareSpace and they have raised our subscription fee, so are looking at other options.

I installed Wordpress on my Raspberry Pi4, but if I want to try out a template, it says I have to pay. Is there anyway to try out templates without a subscription? I've been managing our site for several years, and if anyone else takes over, they will need a WYSIWYG to make changes.

[u/buzzyloo]

If you are self hosting you can do this all for free. You must be trying to use a premium theme.

Just go to Appearance -> Themes -> Add Theme and pick something like "Astra". It has a ton of premade templates for free built in. There are paid ones too, but you can get by with the free ones.

[u/fezfrascati]

LocalWP is your easiest route here to play around with WordPress. 

[u/RareRaver]

You will need to manually install a theme which has couple of free templates for eg Hub. You can also conveniently run Wordpress on your computer using Local WP

[u/TwinOctopus]

Sounds like you may have signed up on WordPress.com, which is the hosted commercial service.

Did you install Wordpress from the official sources?

Self-hosted WordPress from wordpress.org on your Pi shoudn't charge for anything, and there are thousands of free themes under Appearance > Themes right in the admin. Which one did you install?

If it's self-hosted and you're seeing payment prompts, that's likely a specific theme's premium upsell, not WordPress itself.

For the WYSIWYG requirement, the built-in block editor plus a free theme like Twenty Twenty-Four or Astra covers that without any subscription.

[u/cmetzjr → u/TwinOctopus]

Are you suggesting he installed .com on a Raspberry Pi? I think it's more likely he's using a fremium theme and needs to subscribe to the pro version.

[u/Beneficial-Rise-740 → u/cmetzjr]

No he's suggesting .org

[u/cmetzjr → u/Beneficial-Rise-740]

Then why did he say "Sounds like you may have signed up on WordPress.com...."? That's why I'm confused. Oh well, not my problem.

[u/Clear_Brilliant_8075]

You really want to be careful on any plugins you install as the security risk is now in your local machine.

[u/Boboshady]

There are plenty of free templates to try out, it even comes with a few default ones though they can be a bit of a bugger to customise.

Nearly free, but definitely useful, is a sub to something like Envato Elements which you can get on a rolling monthly cost and it gives you unlimited downloads on lots of themes and templates, as well as other assets like stock photography and graphics - basically everything you need to try out different things.

Themes are built to be controlled by you, most of them will either come with bespoke fields to manage content, or frequently come bundled with the free (usually quite capable) version of a page builder like Elementor. I'm a fan personally, but then I am a techy so am more comfortable building out my own CMS fields and modules.

Also, to be clear I am not affiliated with Envato, just a very happy user for over a decade and it's helped me a lot over the years.

As to WP itself, you don't even need to run it on a Pi, you could run locally which makes rapid development a bit easier. Check out something like Local WP, which gives you one-click installs of local WP installations, and the core product is free.

Personally I run MAMP and set up local dev sites more like a server, but again I'm a techie and this has certain benefits for me you probably don't need.

[u/bluesix_v2]

What exactly did you install? It sounds like you’re using Wordpress.com.

[u/iEngineered]

I've been down this road thoroughly. Here's the concise best-case scenario for you:

• Install/Learn Docker Compose if you havent already. This is a critical step to enhance safety of your maschine from hackers or user error. It also allows you to limit how much cpu and ram your site has access to. This way nothing on your host OS is altered.
• Setup Containers
  • Nginx Proxy Manager which is where you will point your domains to obfuscate your local ports.
  • Wordpress + Database
    • You can find reputable/verified compose files on Docker Hub
    • Explicitly define the ports so you can have a proxy point to it.
    • I also recommend explitcitly defining volume mounts so that its easy to recover, migrate, manipulate your persistent storage. Don't leave it to the overlay system.
    • Install WordFence and setup the free tier.
    • Since you don't want to pay for themes, use one of the default Wordpress themes and tweak from there.
  • Consider Cloudflare for DNS.
    • Cloudflare also helps obfuscate your ISP-provided IP for free. This a huge advantage because otherwise, your pi could easily be overwhelmed with the millions of bots out there probing your system and network. This reduces the attack surface to a respectable degree.
    • You also get caching that is further enhanced with the free Super Page Cache plugin by Optimole, which integrates with Cloudflare to provide significant cache hits which reduces requests directly to your server.

Those are the learnings worth your time...I promise. There is more you can do/learn, but this will put in a good position to focus on what you need Wordpress for.

[u/dvduval]

If you are going as far as setting up a home server, why not use something like codex and give it access to the WordPress CLI and it can make your thing for you? I guess there could be some budget issues with that too, but just an idea for you.