Dr. Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov Sculpture photo by Flickr user dbking. Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov (May 21, 1921 – December 14, 1989) was an eminent Soviet nuclear physicist, dissident and human rights activist. Sakharov was an advocate of civil liberties and reforms in the Soviet Union. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975. (wikipedia)

There is a small project that I’m working on with a friend, and since for years I’ve wanted to try Python…

I find two of the greatest assistants in learning and developing expertise in something are:

• Helping someone else (teaching).
• Using something else (compare).

Experimenting with something else helps me take the emotions and religion out of what I’m developing expertise in. It lends to a pragmatic foundation and helps be able to speak to another audience.

So while I work on this Python project, I won’t feel like I’m cheating on PHP and WordPress. Instead I’m continuing my learning about both and will be a better representative of both.

Gels Saby Demoing at DemoCamp Victoria

While at An Event Apart SF, I went to look up something on the Victoria Better Web Posse’s site, and was saddened to find that it’s offline, “Address Not Found”. I’ve emailed Gels Saby hoping to find out the status, but haven’t heard back from her yet.

Joan McIlmoyl Cleghorn on the Victoria Linux User Group (VLUG) wrote

As I understand it from someone who was a member of Web Posse, it has folded. OTOH, WEAV amalgamated with Big Blue & Cousins about a year and a half ago. Currently, a former WEAV member is running a Web Tools Special Interest Group monthly.

If this is the case, this is a big bummer. I found the Better Web Posse to have a refreshing design focus lacking from WEAV before it and Big Blue & Cousins still today. The Better Web Posse brought together many talented designers, developers and other workers of the web.

It seemed like Gels and a few other people did a lot of work to bring the posse together. Thank you!

It is also the acronym for the stack of software that WordPress runs on where the W is for Windows not WordPress. Windows
Apache
MySQL
PHP

Wow, there are a lot of ways to install it.

WAMP is the awkward cousin of LAMP where the L is for Linux.

LAMP is what much of the web is built on, and the acronym is all to familiar to a web developer’s ear. There are other popular web “stacks”, but WordPress was written in PHP using this stack because it is ubiquitous/everywhere/available on every host.

PHP isn’t a sexy programming language like Python, Ruby, or for the Microserfs .NET, but the WordPress developers have always put first what is most important: everyone being able to use WordPress, and a 5 minute install helps, a lot.

I always recommend developing in an environment as close to what your customers are using , or in the case of a web service the environment that the service will run on.

WordPress is run on a lot of LAMP like environment where the most common variations are, of course, different versions of the software. In putting the WordPress members first, WordPress developers have stayed unsexy by supporting older versions of MySQL and PHP.

Next to running on older versions, the most common variation is using litehttpd, Windows’ IIS, or LiteSpeed Web Server. Solaris for the OS seems to be an increasingly popular choice for web servers.

Environment specific bugs with WordPress are very rare, but when they do occur they have seemed to be PHP version related, or Windows IIS specific. We are very fortunate to have participants like Robert Deaton with the expertise to work around PHP related issues. We are fortunate to have contributors like “Computer Guru” of NeoSmart Technologies and Bas Bosman (nazgul) reporting all problems they find with WordPress on Windows IIS.

So there I was setting up a development environment on Windows because my Ubuntu Linux was laptop temporarily out of commission. The first part of this is installing WAMP.

There are a huge number of popular WAMP packages. Wikipedia (encyclopedia++) has a comparison page of WAMPs. Any of the popular ones that have been updated in the last six months would probably be a good choice.

When I have a choice where there seems to be no difference in functionality, I choose based on which one appears to have the strongest community or is better produced and supported. Which of those two depends on whether I’m looking for community and free, or produced and paid support. With community and free, I’m ultimately taking the risk that I will be by myself in investigating any problems.

Here community and free are a good choice, because I’m not going to need a more advanced WAMP stack with monitoring (now).

There are a huge number of popular choices, but the most popular based on reading blog posts and forums seem to be XAMPP and WAMP (now called WAMPServer). I’m surprised by how much more popular XAMPP is given that WAMP has the generic name. XAMPP seems to have few Google Search results related to “security exploit”, so the popularity isn’t likely negative because of bad security.

So that is the long story of me choosing to install XAMPP on Windows Vista.

I will probably follow up with some of my notes from installing it, but for now I leave you with my colleague Mark Riley’s still excellent Installing Xampp and WordPress or John Godley’s Installing WordPress on your own Windows computer. After you are setup on Windows (if you must) see Peter Westwood (westi)’s Windows WordPress Toolbox.

Update Sept 19th: Chris Kasten (handysolo) is writing a great series of posts the first one being Testing New WordPress Versions Part 1: XAMPP