In today’s screencast, the first of a series, I am going to go all the way back to basics and walk you through setting up a local development environment (the easy way) on your computer that will allow you to code in PHP, develop applications, and test scripts such as WordPress, Drupal, MODx, etc. This series of screencasts may be rudimentary for some of you, but I think that for the very rank beginners these may help lower the barrier to entering the world of web development.
Useful Links:
WampServer
XAMPP
MAMP
Hi Mary,
I followed your MODx tutorials and now have the basic bones of a website running on my local WAMP server (setup using your excellent tutorial). Before I do any more work I would like to know how to port this over to a web server. I have found some instructions in the MODx wiki but it’s all gobbledegook to me! Any chance of one of your excellent tutorials or webcasts on how to do this?
David
David
Glad you found the tuts helpful. This is on my to-do list, so keep checking in and be patient, I have a very long to-do list 🙂
mary
Hi Mary,
Thanks for your web-cast of the Website local development environment.
I wonder if you could help me.
I used the MODx Swansong template to develop my Website, which is about 75% done. As I tried to understand Wayfinder more and Otienos advised we should not exercise his example on-line, I accidentally found XAMPP for setting up my local environment. XAMPP itself is running fine, but I could not install MODx 1.0.4 on it (Err: IIS 7 : HTTP Error – 404.0 – Not Found). An expert in the MODx Forum said “IIS is grabbing the request before XAMPP.” I disabled IIS, but the problem was not resolved.
My question is, what’s the difference between WampServer and Xampp? Should I use WampServer instead?
If you could advise me, it will be most appreciated.
Kind Regards,
Ken
Ken
I’ve never used IIS, and I haven’t used XAMPP much, my personal preference has always been to either install Apache, PHP and MySQL separately and then do the configuration myself, or else to use Wampserver on Windows and MAMP on the mac.
That said, I did a bit of searching around and found this, which might be helpful for you: http://one7.wordpress.com/2009/04/28/using-xampp-and-iis-together-easy-solution/
Hope it helps
mary
Mary,
Thank you very much for your help. I sincerely appreciate it.
Fist of all, I never installed IIS, and I have no intention of using it. It suddenly showed up on my PC.
I went ahead and tried WampServer, but the symptom was the same as with Xampp. I never installed IIS7. It’s just sitting there all of a sudden. I uninstalled it, and I also disabled the IIS from the control panel. However, I am still getting IIS7’s welcome screen when I click on “localhost” on the WampServer menue.
I went further to look around and found something interesting. There was
iisstart.htm
in a folder called “wwwroot” in “inetpub”, which was place in the root directory. I never installed it. It’s also suddenly sitting there. I suspect this is the culprit, but I am afraid of deleting the folder, as Microsoft has probably put it there. Do you know if deleting it may cause system problems?
As I googled for “inetpub” I found many people complaining about its sudden appearance.
In the “Program Files” folder, there are two sub-folders — IIS and IIS Express, but because they are not on the installed programs list, I have no way of uninstalling them. If you could tell me how to get rid of them, it will be most appreciated.
Thanks again for your help.
Kenji
Mary,
Thank you so much for your Beginner Tutorials. It was so helpful for you to take me step by step through the process of downloading, installing, and configuring WAMP – Creating a database and users in MySQL – Creating Virtual Hosts for the localserver – and lastly installing WordPress on my local server. All of this gathered in one place, with easy, detailed instructions. Again thank you for your service to me and all of us – it’s so appreciated 🙂
Smiles, Jagrav