PHP (WordPress) development using Eclipse and XAMPP
As can be determined from my other posts, I'm a Java Developer by trade and Eclipse is my editor of choice. Now I have gone to the darkside now and then for some good out of the box software, such as WordPress, which as you may know is written in PHP. The main reason I chose WordPress was because of it's great community, it's focus on best practices, and the huge number of plug-ins enabling any blog functionality you could imagine, this mix just doesn't seem to be present in an Open source Java-based blog software package. So to the point, I want to be able to develop my WordPress themes, and any other PHP projects for that matter, in the same manner I develop Java applications - In my favorite IDE, which is loaded with features we won't discuss here, with the ability to test the changes locally before I promote them to production. Using the Presentation tab in the WordPress admin console is not an optimal solution or a good development practice. Now these instructions aren't for the faint of heart and I will assume that you most likely have some sort of programming background, or general cognitive skills and that you can get by without a bunch of pretty pictures and click this, click that, click ok, hopefully you've installed shit before. These instructions are geared towards Windows, nobody's perfect, but all the software used here is available for Linux, you may just have to do a little work to make that jump.
List of installs, you can stop here if you don't need me
XAMPP Lite 1.6.5
JDK 1.6
Eclipse 3.3
PHPEclipse 1.1.8
WordPress
MySQL GUI Tools
Date Driven Development or what I like to call DEE-DEE-DEE
The company I work for has recently undergone a profoundly dumb transformation. Years ago when management seemed to care, we had a small development team striving to move toward a more Agile, test-driven methodology, we scheduled releases based on a realistic feature-set with realistic estimates and due dates. We were on top of our game, the best in our industry, and we cared about our work.
About a year or so ago that all started to change, upper-management made a culture-altering decision, they committed to an Oracle ERP implementation with a two year time-frame for completion, without asking IT how long something of this size might take. So the date was set and the countdown clocks were installed and the "Great place to work" mentality that the company had formerly professed went straight into the toilet. Development began to receive impossible tasks, with impossible dates, and the pressure became unbearable fast. We ramped up hiring and brought on droves of contractors to fill the parking lot and the smoking tents and collect unbelievable fees. Now there is not a person left in IT that is happy about their job or excited about what they do, even the new people hate the place. Our talent has started to look elsewhere and some of our best have already started to leave. The new developers smell the discontent from a mile away and with no allegiance or roots tying them down, they don't last long. Whether the company will make it through this remains to be seen, the word on the street is that nobody has successfully implemented an ERP of this size, which encourages us to throw our hands up. It'll pass.
Honestly, when management picked that magical date out of their asses and made the decision to drive their people into the ground to achieve it, they doomed the company to certain failure or at least us to certain insanity. If nothing else, money has been wasted and years will be spent digging out of this mess, and the competition will continue to surpass us. I believe a company's success is directly dependent on it's people, and I have yet to find a person that believes this project will be a success or believes in the direction the company is heading. I'm sure we're not the first out there to do this, nor will we be the last. We've seen over and over in the corporate world that there are more DEE-DEE-DEE's everyday getting paid huge amounts of money to screw things up, this is a losing battle.
In the future don't bother to ask me how long something will take, just pull a date out of your ass and let me know when you want it D-D-D-Done.