Desktop Server – ServerPress is no more!

written by: Jeff McNear

In 2010, Steve Carnam started ServerPress with the vision of creating simple-to-use workflow services for WordPress Designers and Developers. These services allowed for easy onboarding, yet remained robust enough to allow for infinite growth with the user…. at the beginning of August the announcement went out that they will be shutting down operations.

At least for now existing installations of this local server environment will work just fine, but there will be no further updates and support is bound to be minimal … this leaves their user base with need to find a viable alternative.

Of course there is always WAMP | MAMP | XAMP … but since I last checked Flywheel & WPEngine have joined hands to create https://localwp.com/

Localwp is very much like Desktop Server in that it allows you to spin up multiple WordPress instances in a local environment in a self-contained and local environment, however some of the developer plugins found in Desktop Server are not present.

It is important to note that that Localwp will give you the ability to change the environment of the local host in terms of the webserver (Apache \ NGINX) and PHP version (5.6.39 \ 7.3.5 \ 7.4.1 \ 8.0) and for those sites hosted on Flywheel or WPEngine a direct connection between the local and production environments.

One other peculiarity is that Localwp has its’ own proprietary version of PHPmyAdmin called the “Adminer” … Unlike phpMyAdmin, which only supports the management of MySQL and MariaDB databases, Adminer also supports managing other databases such as PostgreSQL, SQLite, MS SQL, Oracle, SimpleDB, Elasticsearch, MongoDB, and Firebird.