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
Upgrades complete at GreatWebGuy, we’re back now and posting
We're still here, just been too busy to blog, it's been a month, but we've done a lot.
First and foremost we found a new host and at a great price. We opted for a VPS at JTLNet, for $19.95/mo. we get 15GB of disk space, 256MB of guaranteed memory, 200GB of bandwidth and the ability to install any software we want. We wouldn't recommend this setup to anyone that doesn't know what they're doing, but it's a great alternative to a dedicated server. The guys at JTLNet are top notch, many a night we've opened support tickets at 1 a.m. because we hit one roadblock or another and they're there and on top of the issue within an hour.
Having the freedom to pick your own software and not be bound to what your host is running is a beautiful, yet time consuming, thing. I've swapped out the Apache web server for Lighttpd (Lighty) 1.5, the mod_decompress module in Lighty has reduced our page sizes by 85%. For those that don't know, Lighty is a lightweight web server that serves up PHP via FastCGI faster than Apache using mod_php, it's still in Beta but so far it seems stable enough and pretty quick. We upgraded our PHP version to 5.1.2 and MySQL to 5.27 to gain any performance improvements the newer versions are bound to have. Last but not least we migrated to WordPress 2.2 and added some Ajax goodness to the site, notice as you click around we're no longer refreshing the entire page, but just the post content.
All in all things are running smoothly now, not to say we didn't hit several hurdles upgrading and migrating to a new server and platform. We'll be sharing the details of the upgrades and our troubles in our upcoming posts.
Imhosted blacklisted by GreatWebGuy
So the webguy was out and about looking for a good hosting provider and thought a good deal was found at ImHosted, well the webguy was WRONG!!
I set up the account the night before last and received my order confirmation email, which stated that I needed to activate my account, so I click the link to activate my account and follow the instructions, which I'm then prompted that I'm already activated. Funny thing was I had no host account details, so I tried to contact "live" online support, this required that I install ICQ and attempt to talk to dijo, who doesn't ever answer. I give up and open a support ticket, late the next afternoon I received the Account Activation email, which has all my details. I wonder what happens if my site is down, do I wait a day and a half for a response? So I log into the cpanel to check things out and find that the Unlimited domains, Unlimited hosting accounts on the account I paid for means nothing, since there's no way to modify my DNS zone records within the Control Panel, so I fire off another email and support ticket, which went unanswered today. I'm tired of waiting for support to get back to me, I found another account with more space, more bandwidth, and less money at 1&1 Internet and I have plans to call and cancel the other account in the morning, provided they honor their 100% Satisfaction guaranty.
Eclipse – Open Resource Shortcut – Ctrl+Shift+R
The biggest time-saver I've stumbled upon in Eclipse is the Open Resource Shortcut. Under the Navigate menu is the Open Resource command, shortcut Ctrl+Shift+R, which opens a window that allows you to type a search for any file that exists in your workspace, in your search you can use the ? to replace a single character or * to replace an entire string, the search is amazingly fast. If you've worked on a project for a long time you know the names of all of your php, jsp's, classes, xml files, and properties, and digging through the folder structure in the Navigator and Project Explorer views can be time consuming and annoying. I've trained my self to use it so much that IDE's that don't have a comparable feature, like JDeveloper, annoy me to no end.
Hosted WordPress Blog – How to do it quickly
There are several sites such as wordpress.com and blogger.com where you can sign up for free and start your blog right away.
But if you're like me, that's not good enough, you want to express your individuality, make your own name, control your own destiny. You want your own domain and your own host so that you have everything you need to express yourself. This article will give you the down low on where to reserve your own domain name, set up hosting, install blogging software, all this at the low cost of $8.95/yr. for the domain and $3.95/mo. for hosting.