August 11, 2016

WP Agency Review: Pressmatic

By Matt Peacock

Getting us to change from our tried and tested development process is always a challenge and even though we are constantly looking to improve, our dev tools have stayed static for the last couple of years.

Enter Pressmatic…

Pressmatic (https://pressmatic.io/) comes with the simplest of slogans “Install WordPress on your Mac” and quite simply this is what it does. You can create new sites with a click of a button ready for development locally on your Mac (PC version coming soon). The beauty is in the simplicity.

How does it compare to our old system?

We had used Mamp Pro for a few years now and to be honest we were always super happy with how it worked. We could create sites easily, play around with settings and generally just get on with building sites. What Pressmatic gives us is that little bit of time saving that makes all the difference. Everything we need to build great WordPress sites locally is covered. From super fast automated set-up to easy access to the database, Pressmatic does everything we need with the minimum amount of fuss and the minimal amount of time spent on it.

Pressmatic has some great features and these include:

  • You can choose to run either Apache or nginx
  • Choose different versions of PHP for each site
  • You can easily set up WordPress multisite without having to go through the pesky file updates
  • Easily add a secure certificate for SSL testing
  • All your settings like email address and password are pre-stored so are not needed when you create a new site
  • You can easily change the name of your dev url
  • One click launch of the database through Adminer or Sequel Pro
  • Site templates – Create a clone of a site to use as a template which can be applied to a new site. This, for us, is the best feature. Now we can set up site that has our default theme, demo content and all settings already set up. That’s a 5 to 10 minute saving every time we create a new site which is amazing

We are really happy with our move away from Mamp Pro onto using Pressmatic and look forward to future releases as i know there are going to be some exciting things coming. Yes, the price might be a factor (currently $99) for some people. The way we see it we will more than make that value back just by being quicker at setting sites up so for us it’s a no-brainer. There also isn’t currently a trial period available although i would hope this is something that the lead developers would look at as it would increase the amount of people using the software.
If you want a smarter way of setting up WordPress sites on your Mac then Pressmatic is the ideal choice.

Give it a go now at https://pressmatic.io/.