It’s no secret we’re fans of Kinsta as a managed WordPress hosting brand.
So when rumours stirred that Kinsta was working on a new tool to help developers – we were naturally curious. After all, these guys know WordPress like the back of their hand.
Today we’re looking at the freshly launched DevKinsta – a local development suite for WordPress sites. This tool allows anyone to create, manage and experiment with sites locally, i.e. without internet connectivity.
Even better, it’s free for everyone to download and use! Let’s whizz through to see what’s the hype about, and exactly who should be excited about it.
Kinsta’s DevKinsta
Verdict
In a nutshell, DevKinsta is a suite of tools that exist to make local site creation and development quick and easy.
Why is local development useful? Well, it lets you build, edit and test code without an internet connection. It essentially lets you work from anywhere as well as easily debug themes and plugins within different environments.
In short, it’s a great way to streamline your workflow!
With DevKinsta, users are able to design, develop, and deploy WordPress sites (single and multisite) from their local machine.
When you’re ready to go live, you’ll be able to push your site directly to Kinsta. More on this in a bit.
The beauty of DevKinsta is that it’s free and available for anyone to use! You don’t need to be an existing Kinsta customer.
Given its technicalities, it’s obviously not a tool for your average internet user. Instead, it’s built with developers in mind.
Kinsta’s identified 4 groups of web professionals that might find the tool useful:
The DevKinsta tool will be available in 10 different languages. Great news for the global dev community!
DevKinsta’s armed with lots of handy tools, including:
What do we mean here?
Well, Kinsta as a brand has a great track record. In our full review of Kinsta’s WordPress hosting, we’ve tipped our hat before to their great interface and their knowledgeable team of WordPress experts.
Whilst many host providers rely on trusty cPanel or Plesk, Kinsta’s hosting solutions rely on their own custom dashboard called MyKinsta. It’s eye-catching and a breeze to use. Similarly, their DevKinsta tool also offers a nice clean UX.
It’s simple to navigate and just… heckin’ nice on the eyes.
Sure, DevKinsta isn’t the only tool of its kind. But it’s refreshing to see such a simple interface.
As we’ve said, WordPress is Kinsta’s bread and butter. Everyone in their support team has expert knowledge in the intricacies of the platform. This gives us high hopes for DevKinsta and where it can go from here.
It’s still in its early days of roll-out, so we’d expect some bugs and hiccups. However, they already have a useful knowledge base and a community forum dedicated to DevKinsta.
If you decide to use DevKinsta, consider joining the forum to give your 2 cents and (their words) ‘contribute to shaping the future of DevKinsta’.
It sounds like marketing speak but Kinsta seems to be walking the talk. We can already see their engineers in active dialogue with real-time users.
Lastly, whilst you don’t need to be a Kinsta customer to use DevKinsta, it does come with nifty integrations if you ARE a Kinsta customer.
These include:
All this should mean that DevKinsta should slot easily into your current workflow and make life just that little bit easier.
DevKinsta is currently available for macOS and Windows. If you’re looking to download it, head to the download section on the DevKinsta website.
Since it’s just been launched, you may need to fill in a contact form first to get the link sent to you.
Once installed, you can kick things off in 1 of 3 ways:
DevKinsta certainly looks like a promising tool.
Given these are the brains behind a premium managed WordPress hosting – it’s pretty exciting to see the Kinsta team offering a free solution to make developers’ lives easier.
If you’re looking for a tool to create and manage WordPress sites locally, DevKinsta is definitely worth checking out.
