Jeff Bridgforth :: Webcraftsman

Crafting Web sites since 1999

I am a Web designer passionate about creating elegant, inspiring, and usable Web experiences that connect with an audience and fulfull business objectives.

WAMP and PHP Development

January 3, 2006

Design (Web)

A cou­ple of weeks ago, I started work­ing on a tuto­r­ial to add a forum to a site using Dreamweaver, PHP and MySQL. The tuto­r­ial pointed me to a prod­uct called WAMP, which is a pack­age of Apache, PHP and MySQL that allows you to run a test server on your local machine. I have been hes­i­tant to load these soft­ware pack­ages sep­a­rately because when I have inves­ti­gated it in the past, it meant chang­ing some con­fig­u­ra­tions in Win­dows and I don’t feel com­fort­able doing that. I had tried another prod­uct for awhile but it did not have an updated ver­sion of PHP. WAMP has the lat­est so I am giv­ing it a try. One of my goals this year is to learn how to do some more devel­op­ment with PHP. I was excited last week when I received a book I recently ordered, PHP for Dreamweaver 8. Now I just need to make some time in my sched­ule to work through it.

2 Comments

  1. Jacky Kenna

    March 3rd, 2006

    Hi

    I am not a com­puter expert but I pub­lish a mag­a­zine using all the appro­pri­ate pro­grams so I am not a com­plete idiot but I can not fol­low the following.

    These are ver­ba­tim direc­tions from the Lynda.com.PHP.Essential.Training by Brian Maxx which fol­low the instal­la­tion of WAMP.

    I actu­ally use a vir­tual host I have this infor­ma­tion in another note pad file and I place it at the very end of this file here
    You can spec­ify a server name and if you have a spe­cial host then you can put that host or whole url name the domain name. 1

    The doc­u­ment root is impor­tant This is where is mine is going to be and if you look at the Dreamweaver videos you can see that this is my path.2
    I have an index.php file which is going to be the default there and you can actu­ally move it to the front if it is not there. Space delam­i­nated so you put what­ever you want there. That’s really all you need there. Plus your IP address it could be one mine hap­pens to be 114. You could just use local host it doesn’t really mat­ter. But this is how I would set up a vir­tual host if you want to go to an out­side direc­tory. 2
    There are other ways to get this started but I have a lot of hosts on this machine or a lot of dif­fer­ent fold­ers that I am going to be work­ing with and I need one vir­tual host and I have a least 20 on this machine.4

    And this all sep­a­rate from other Apache installs that you nay have. So once you save that file you have to actu­ally come down there and you don’t click it you hold the but­ton there to get wamp server to work for you and then you go to apache and you just restart the service.

    If you have made a mis­take a syn­tax error in your ini file 5 then it won’t load. You have to actu­ally check some things but if you just did it in a nor­mal way you shouldn’t get errors but you would have to research it if it didn’t start.6

    1>
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    4 >
    5 >
    6 >

    I have Dreamweaver 8.
    I have win­dows XP
    I have made sim­ple HTML sites.
    I use IIS as a test site.
    I use C:Inetpub
    After installing WAMP I get_
    “you are not autho­rised to view this pageâ€? when I hit Local host in the tray.
    “The page can­not be foundâ€? when I hit sqlite­m­an­ager or php­myad­min in the tray.
    I can still see my html sites in IIS.

    I notice that on Brian Maxx’s screen Exam­ples Php­myad­min and sql­man­ager are in WWW yet when I load they are one up in WAMP. Does this make a dif­fer­ence? I assume that the Exam­ples are loaded later.

    Look­ing at the tray I see that one ser­vice is run­ning. I do not know which one. I have clicked on start all ser­vices but it makes no difference

    I am not sure if the direc­tions above are required if I am using IIS. Can I run Wamp and use C:Inetpub and IIS?

    I have also read that it is not advised to use Skype at the same time and I there­fore assume that there must be other such pro­grams which should be avoided. Does this mean that Skype can not be used. Some peo­ple use that as their main com­mu­ni­ca­tion to other parts of the world.

    With great respect but I have bought Lynda.com.PHP.Essential.Training because of the rep­u­ta­tion of the com­pany Using WAMP has been rec­om­mended by Brian Maxx who praises the prod­uct. I have great respect for cre­aters of these pro­grams and for those who work to pass on knowl­edge and I am sure that once this obsta­cle is over­come then Lynda.com.PHP.Essential.Training will be excel­lent bit till then I am stuck.

    I am upset at the above. I would be pleased if any­one can direct me for here.

    I would like step by step instructions.

    Jacky Kenna
    London

  2. Jeff

    March 7th, 2006

    I am not sure why you asked your ques­tion in the com­ments of my blog. I am not asso­ci­ated with WAMP. I only wrote about it on my blog. I have used it with­out any prob­lems. WAMP has built in APACHE so I am not sure if you need IIS. I would encour­age you to con­tact the WAMP devel­op­ers through their web­site. Here is the address: http://www.wampserver.com/en/index.php