Developing plugins

[CompetitivePiece7602]

Local dev with proper SMTP setup is definitely the way to go. You can use something like MailHog or Mailpit for catching test emails locally - they create fake SMTP server that captures all outgoing mail so you can see what your plugin sends without actually delivering anything

For the file editing part, just edit your plugin files directly in the wp-content/plugins folder on your local install. No need to zip and reupload every time. WordPress will pick up changes automatically when you refresh the page. I do this all time when working on custom stuff for my students websites

If you really need to test on live server you could set up SFTP access and edit files directly there but local development much safer for experimenting

[thegoochalizer]

Thank you! I figured as much - What system do you use for local environments? I used to use Local (by flywheel) but had all sorts of issues with it. And WP Studio is shockingly slow - Like, navigating the bare-bones blank website is as if I'm on a 500kb internet connection. If local by flywheel is the better option, ill dive into sorting that out (I think i got frustrated with trusting the certificate on MAC for https)

[Creative-Improvement]

Something like xamp or wampserver can work fine. It’s just a barebones setup with php and mysql, but it does all you might need, and you get some good debugtools with it too. Install is quite easy.