In today’s episode, we talk all about Local by Flywheel. We focus in on what is it, what it does and how it can help save you time when developing your WordPress projects.
Learn More About Flywheel & Local
https://keeganlaniermedia.com/getfly
Learn about Marv and the Bebizzy team
Keegan 0:00
In today’s episode, we’re talking about the best local WordPress development area, period.
Keegan 0:22
Alright, ladies and gentlemen, Episode 5.3, season five, Episode Three. Today we’re talking about local development environments. You guys know if you’ve been here enough, if you’ve been listening to the podcast for quite a while, we are huge, huge, huge, huge fans of efficient workflows. But more importantly, we’re huge fans of the hosting that we use, which is Flywheel. This company is awesome managed back end managed WordPress. The dashboard is beautiful. It’s simple, it’s easy to navigate. But even more than that, they have a product called Local, local by flywheel is just unreal, such an awesome simple program that you can install anywhere. In fact, they just launched Linux, which is really, really cool. But basically, what you do is you open up, you install local, and you can fire up WordPress installations very quick.
Keegan 1:25
The beauty of this is that it installs so I’m looking at a demo site that I have set up right now, PHP version 7.2, point nine, MySQL version 5.7, point two, three and WordPress version 5.2. Point three. Everything is local, everything is super fast. So it speeds up the development time, you don’t have to wait for the internet and server and worry about your connection speeds or any of those types of things. It’s really, really cool. You can view your site, you can turn them off, you can turn them back on. But what’s really cool is if you pair it with flywheel hosting, because what happens from there is that you can take websites you have in your flywheel hosting, and pull the live version down into local, make your adjustments, and then push the version that you’ve adjusted locally back into your live version.
Keegan 2:15
And Flywheel manages the back and forth. So when you push your site, it packages up all your local files, it sends it to the flywheel server than the flywheel server actually processes the entire file that you’ve sent over, pushes it into the live place and then shoot you an email and says, Hey, we’re ready your site is live, we’ve done all the work we need to do. Everybody who comes to your site from now on wants their cache refreshes, you’re gonna see the new version of your site. So it’s super cool. It’s a very effective, very efficient way to develop sites. And even more than that, being able to pull the live version and not make changes on the live site is another pro tip. Make sure you’re doing that so that you’re not running the risk of destroying your live version and impacting guests who are going to your site.
Keegan 3:06
For a brochure style site, which we had for a very long time. It’s not necessarily the end of the world. But whenever you’re doing any kind of sales, or e commerce or any of those things, you got to be extremely, extremely careful with the way that you do these things. You have to make sure that everything is compatible, all of your backups are done, you know, you’re not breaking the actual payment process, or the integrations with Stripe, or PayPal or whichever processor you’re using. Because that’s kind of the key to your whole longevity, right. I mean, if you can’t collect payment, it’s gonna be really tough to stay in business. So that takes me back to a Local, Local by flywheel. The other really really, really cool thing they have is what they call Blueprints, and you can do that inside of flywheels hosting on their website, or you can do it in local.
Keegan 3:53
And basically what that is, you can fire up WordPress, you can get your theme, your plugins, all of your license keys in place. This is your base installation. It’s a I use it for I basically go in install, Divi and install smart crawl, integrate WPMU DEV. So I can have Smush Pro, and smart crowd pro and form inator Pro and a few of those other plugins that they’ve got, I can have them already set up, the integration is completely done. And then I take a snapshot or what they call a blueprint. And that allows me the next time I want to fire up a new site, I can say, rather than starting from scratch, I can start from my blueprint. And that in itself will save me, you know, 30 to 45 minutes, maybe an hour for every new site that I’m building. So imagine being able to shave off that hour of time from your project, every single project, you do 50 projects a year, you just saved yourself over an entire average work week.
Keegan 4:52
That’s huge. I mean, that’s big 50 times whatever your hourly rate is, I mean that’s the money you save, just in implementing this one. There’s a ton of other reasons or a ton of other ways that you can be more effective. But that one is one that turns into real dollars and cents and save time, you can reallocate that time in a lot of different ways, whether it’s, you know, working on an additional project or spending more time with your family, you know, whatever is the most important thing for you, it frees up time for you to be able to do that.
Keegan 5:21
So I can’t say enough about how much I really love Local by Flywheel that there’s also they’ve introduced local Pro, and local pros built for teams. So if you’ve got a distributed team, and you want to build locally, but you need to use Local Pro, you can do that. And you can assign teams and different people to individual projects. That in itself is pretty massive. And it gives you a whole different workflow and a whole nother way to develop websites with a team. I love it. I’m a huge flywheel fan if you can’t tell, if you’re if you’re not familiar with Flywheel check out you go to Keegan Lanier Media.com slash get fly and it’ll take you right to the site, you can check it out, it is an affiliate link, we will get a little bit back on it. We’d appreciate the support. If not get flywheel.com. We’re not we don’t care too much if you if we get the kickback on it so much as you getting a good platform. And we’re not going to suggest anything here that that we don’t ourselves use.
Keegan 6:20
So flywheel is where we host all of our clients sites and where we will continue to host all of our flywheel all of our client sites unless something drastic changes. Hopefully, hopefully, praying to the WordPress gods. That doesn’t happen. But we hope that you’ve really gotten something out of this we’d love for you to check out Local by flywheel. I think it’s going to change the way you develop websites. And no it will because it’s changed the way we do it.
Keegan 6:48
Hope that you’ve really gotten a lot out of this episode. This is the end of Episode Three of Season Five. You know we’re gonna be back in one more week with another episode. But we also wanted to end this with a shout out. We’ve got our friends over at be busy. We just finished doing a podcast with them talking about our love of Divi, and they were one of you they were on the other side of the microphone here listening to the Divi addicts podcast and they are fellow Divi Addicts. Marv is a fantastic guy. Really, really cool human being who loves Divi, and is is really invested in the community and spreading the word about people in the community. So go over to be busy.com check them out. I think you’re gonna find a lot of cool topics that you’re really going to enjoy over on their site as well and follow Marv Be Busy on Twitter.
Keegan 7:41
But again, we appreciate you being here. We appreciate you listening to another episode of Divi addicts, we hope that you’re really enjoying us returning to form and dropping new content every single Tuesday. We’ll be right back here in seven days with Episode Four Season Five. We appreciate you We love you. We hope that you’re enjoying everything that’s coming from the Divi addicts podcast, and if there’s any way we can get better. All you got to do is let us know till next week. We’ll see you then have an awesome one.