TWIFcomp

A couple days ago, I installed XAMPP on my MacBook Pro.  XAMPP is a web stack that lets me work on websites offline by acting as a local version of the webserver that normally hosts the internet-visible version of my websites. XAMPP makes this pages available only to me, so I can mess around with them all I want, without having to offend the world with web page experiments gone awry.

XAMPP is pretty cool, and works well out of the box. I downloaded the latest version from the www.apachefriends.org website and just followed the directions.  The English language documentation is sufficient to get everything working, although the primary language of this project has been German, and the German documentation is much richer. Which would be great if I spoke German, but I don't, except by analogy to Dutch, which I don't speak either.

With XAMPP installed on my MacBook under OS X (10.5), I've now got a nicely packaged bunch of tools/services available including MySQL, PHP, phpmyadmin, MySQLite, and PERL. The whole thing is nicely integrated. Once up and running, I followed the security recommendations and then some to lock down the install.

Next, I poked around a bit in the Apache configuration and the hosts file and set up a few virtual host directories. It took a bit of tweaking, but I moved the vhosts outside the default XAMPP htdocs directory and into something more convenient. I put a fresh install of drupal 6.10 into one as a "sandbox" site, and it performed flawlessly, with the webserver and mysql behaving exactly as I'd hoped. I had to make some minor tweaks to the global PHP configuration which seemed a bit Scrooge-like in its memory allocation, and some site-specific tweaks were also made to local php environment.

Next, I copied over this (the http://dhakajack.templaro.com) website, to make a parallel development version.  That is, I backed up the file system and the associated database and installed it in a vhost (in this case, dhakajack.local) on my laptop.  I only had to edit one line in the settings.php file to get it working on the laptop, and I think I see a way to make it work either way, so it the site can be copied from the laptop to the net and not need manual tweaking.

Finally, I went back to the RileyCon website (http://rileycon.templaro.com), which is running under drupal 4.7 -- ancient history.  I backed the site up and brought it over the laptop as well in its own vhost.  The RileyCon site had been set up in a somewhat idiosyncratic manner and I spent a day de-spaghetti-ing its structure and getting it up on the local machine.  After getting the site working again on the laptop, I backed it up again and upgrade both the core system and contributed modules to the latest version 5 install (5.16).  I had heard that going from 4.7.3 to 6.10 would be asking for trouble, so I will produce an intermediate site, and then continue.  It's tempting to attempt some more radical update, going directly to 6.10, but the site has about 700 nodes, and the database structure has changed so much between these versions, that it would be a nightmare.

So, that's where I am now. I am pleased that I picked the right contributed modules back in the 4.6->4.7 days, as they have survived to the current version and are still supported. The 5.16 site is now up and running on the laptop, and all of the deeper structure is working correctly. AFAIK, I haven't lost anything.  The last 5% is to get the theming fixed, and this could take me a day or two, depending on what else is going on.

So, expect dry website-related posts to continue for the forseeable future.