If you're a heavy WordPress developer like me, you might find that you need to create a new installation for each site that requires a strange structure or specific posts, instead of using your uniform local test WordPress installation. Cue WordPress Mu. WordPress Multi User is a platform created by the geniuses at Automattic that is basically a WordPress installation that allows multiple blogs to run using the same software.

The tutorial requires you to already have a setup install of WordPress on your local machine and a working MAMP setup. The guide shows you how to change ports in the config, update the httpd.conf file for the webserver, add in a virtual host and configure the hosts file to point to your WordPress MU installation.

Installing PHP on your development PC allows you to safely create and test a web application without affecting the data or systems on your live website. This article describes PHP installation as a module within the Windows version of Apache 2.2. Mac and Linux users will probably have it installed already.

The process is quick and relatively painless - there's six steps (not including the Apache install, that was covered previously) and only a little bit of messing around with system properties you'll need to do.

In addition to [a local copy of your source] being faster to develop, it lets you work without needing to be connected to the Internet. But what about the tools you use while developing? If you're a PHP developer then the manual at php.net is an invaluable tool. It only make sense to have it available for when you're not online.

His example follows the official mirroring part of the PHP.net website and uses a slightly modified rsync command to fetch the manual information from the php.net site and drops it in a location locally. He throws in an Apache configuration too for a simple VirtualHost to get it up and running.

This post is for the techies who know me, and are switching. Some are coming from Windows, some from Linux, some are designers who need to do some local development. So, I'll try to keep this post as simple as possible, and perhaps more like a tutorial, where you can "copy and paste" commands and files.

He recommends a few pieces of software that you'll need - things like XAMPP and MySQL - and some other "nice to haves" like TextMate, Subversion and Expandrive. He shows how to set up the shell environment, create virtual hosts and add them into the /etc/hosts file so they'll resolve locally.

I've mentioned quite a few times that I am a big fan of Perl programming language. However, most of my programming time these days is spent in PHP. The languages are often similar, with PHP having its roots in Perl, and Perl being such a influence in the world of programming languages. This similarity is often very helpful. However there are a few difference, some of which are obvious and others are not.

His example compares looping (a foreach in both) and how, after the Perl loop the $value variable is no longer accessible. In PHP, however, it's passed back out into the current scope and can be read just like any other variable. While this can be useful, it can also cause headaches when trying to track down elusive bugs.

I needed dates like "Donderdag 23 Oktober", and I was sure PHP should know how to do this without me creating arrays for days of the week and months of the year. With some help from my friend (thanks Derick) I discovered that there is a date function in PHP that takes into account the locale of the script, called strftime.

Her code snippet shows how to set the correct local time (in her case, nl_NL with a UTF-8 encoding) and how to return a formatted string based on formatting characters (much like printf/sprintf).

Today I'm going to look at a local development server and its PHP configuration, as well as some of the IDEs/editors available for Linux, especially the cross-platform options.

Tools mentioned this time include things like a local development server (invaluable) some PHP configuration tips and the editors they mentioned, things like Aptana, Eclipse and Zend Studio.

In this article, I'll show you how to use the powerful collection of Yahoo! APIs to build a mashup with PHP 5. First we'll take a look at what APIs are, and the various offerings from Yahoo! that we can take advantage of. I'll demonstrate how to search the web using Yahoo!'s entire database with only three lines of code, then take you through the process of building an entire application to search for 'Pizza' in 'Palo Alto, CA' with only 25 lines of PHP code.

They show how to consume the RESTful data Yahoo provides via a custom class that makes calling the API simple. They also include the code (and HTML) you'll need to make the mapping for for the locations your search turned up.

It's a universal frustration. You just know that the piece of information you're looking for is somewhere on a site. You click one link, then another, and another. You go back to the home page and try a different branch of the site. After dozens of clicks, you still can't find the information you need. Then it's back to Google and on to another site. At last you find one with an internal search engine. You enter your search term, and voilá!--the information you need pops up in less than a second.

They compare these two types - hosted versus local - and show how to get started on integrating one, the local option, into your site. They start with a few things consider before getting into the choices - the physical issues involved, the page information itself, and how the engine will index.

The rest of the article is devoted to the different options they'd recommend along with ratings, what technology they use, if they're PHP5 compatible, difficulty of installation, and many more criteria. Their list of leading local search engines for your site are:

• Sphider
• MnogoSearch
• TSEP
• PHPDig
• iSearch
• RiSearch

There's no need to install a server and PHP and then try to coordinate them in order to get them to work together. Script GUI comes in one compact package. It includes a server, which is only available to the built-in browser and is a nice security feature. In addition, it supports CGI, virtual hosts, directory aliases, custom error documents and understands most commands in .htaccess files.

He tell how it works (pretty much just install and go) and how it can be configured to work with virtual hosts. Best of all, it already comes with the latest version of PHP for Windows and can interface with several of the popular databases out there.