I’ve been bitten by the web design bug again and thus I have taken to working on Webarnold a little bit more. Some of you may have noticed how things seem to be shifting around a little bit. The navigation bar goes from one side to another…back and forth. I finally forced myself away from this terrible habit so that I may do all my design/building in a non-production environment and then simply upload everything when it’s all done. So for the time being, I’m back to using a simple WordPress theme. At least it’s much less ugly than the last one.
So this whole bit brings up the question, how best to design locally with WordPress (e.g. with PHP, MySQL, CSS, and XHTML)? I don’t know if I have come upon the best answer for me yet. So I open it up to the rest of you web developers out there who read my meager posts. What do you do? My friend Mark showed me the Wamp software at one point and I’ve been considering using that again - but really getting into it and figuring it out this time. My other option is that I have recently come into posession of an older computer that should be sufficient for running some form of Linux, which might be another cool venture all in its own. So I’m looking for some feedback from those of you who read this site about how you do your design work.
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5 responses so far ↓
If you had a Mac you could just run everything locally…PHP, MySQL, Apache, whole bundle. Ah the wonders of Unix. But that’s if you have a mac…
I second the Mac statement. WAMP is still my favorite on the PC though, if you mess it up you just uninstall and start again.
Ok, I get the picture, Macs are good for web development because of their Unix subsystem. But unfortunately I’m not (un)fortunate enough to have a Mac. Looks like I’ll be investigating WAMP again.
No need for a Mac whatsoever. PHP, MySQL and Apache will all run on Windows. You could mirror the setup of your friends using your Windows machine.
For me personally, I don’t like to have all that installed on my workstation though. I have a separate Linux box for development. This allows our 4 developers to access the development files via Samba and work from a mapped drive. This solutions seems more scaleable because we don’t each have to have a webserver and database server running on our personal computers, let alone a copy of the code. Even for my personal site which no one else works on I like having a seperate box for the Apache, PHP, MySQL, etc. This allows me to develop from my laptop, workstation 1 or workstation 2. It’s also helpful when I can SSH into the box directly and make quick edits.
Ethan, what distribution of Linux do you run? Does the Linux box have to be pretty robust or will an older machine work alright?