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