Today I migrated my blog from IIS on Server 2003 to XAMPP on the same server as a test. I am looking into migrating from Blogger to WordPress as my blog design/management software but needed a solid testing environment to do so first. XAMPP takes some great open source tools and puts them together for you. These tools include Apache, MySQL, PHP and Perl. Or take the first letter of those tools and you get AMPP. I don’t know what the X stands for. You cand download it yourself and give it a whirl if you wish. http://www.apachefriends.org
The migration was pretty simple except I’m somewhat of an Apache newbie. I knew where all the config files where and what I needed to edit but for some reason, I couldn’t figure out for the life of me, how to modify the default web page. When you first install XAMPP and go to http://localhost it takes you to http://localhost/xampp. arg.. This was frustrating. Then it dawned on me, they had a redirect in the default site directory /xampp/htdocs that was sending me to the xampp directory. That was easily fixed by changing the .php and .html in that directory to .txt instead. Then I had to modify the vhosts config file located at xampp/apache/conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf. to reflect the web sites that I wanted to run. I had my blog which I put into the xampp/htdocs directory under its own folder and my wifes website http://www.houseandhomeomaha.com in its own directory. To make these sites live I had to add these lines to httpd-vhosts.conf.
DocumentRoot C:/xampp/htdocs/www.curtis-lamasters.com
ServerName www.curtis-lamasters.com
DocumentRoot C:/xampp/htdocs/www.houseandhomeomaha.com
ServerName www.houseandhomeomaha.com
Like I said, very straight forward. I hope you at least give this software a try, the guys at ApacheFriends have been pretty good about keeping this as up to date as possible. Soon, I’ll be documenting how to install wordpress with XAMPP. Come back soon.