WP Express is a free tool which installs WordPress on a local PC or Mac, ideal for building your own web development environment.

The program requires a web server with PHP support and a database manager, but this doesn't have to be as complicated as it sounds. Installing MAMP gets you all of this and more with the absolute minimum of hassle, and the WP Express site has instructions on how to get the program working with a MAMP setup.

We installed WordPress to C:\MAMP\HTDOCS\WP on our test system, and used http://localhost/wp/wp-admin to log in with the database credentials we'd just created.

The WordPress console appeared as usual, and we could create new posts, add media, change themes and more.

A $9 WP Express Pro build offers more control over themes and plugins, enables saving of default settings and WordPress details, and more.