If you're a git user and have thought about bringing things a bit more "in-house" than GitHub but still want some of the perks of the web-based interface, this quick tutorial from PHPMaster about installing Gitlist might interest you.

aking your repositories available in a local intranet is pretty easy, but having a nice interface to interact with those repositories, making collaboration between teams easier, is not that simple. [...] There are other solutions available, but some are too hard to install or, again, hard on the eyes. I recently discovered GitList, a free and open source Git repository viewer. It's interface resembles GitHub a lot but aims to keep everything simple and clear.

He includes the basic installation steps you'll need to get it up and running - setting up the environment, downloading and configuring Gitlist to look at your repositories and pointing out that, since the LESS source is included in the download, you can customize it how you see fit.

PHPMaster.com has a new tutorial posted today about doing development locally with the help of a WampServer installed on your Windows system (there's similar packages for Linux systems).

This article will explain how a development system solves such a problem and how to install the popular Windows-based web development platform WAMP. As a relative newcomer to the PHP language, I hope this article speaks directly to other new programmers who are interested in honing their development skills to eventually become PHP masters.

They explain some of the things that the WAMP server has to offer and how to set it all up (complete with screenshots). Their example configuration just uses the default "localhost" hostname and runs as the "www" user. If you want to get into more of the configuration options available in the tool, you can check out the project's site for details.

If you're a WordPress developer and have been looking for a good guide on setting up a local installation to do some testing, you might want to check into this guide from NETTUTS.com.

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.

In this new article on the SitePoint PHP blog, Craig Buckler shows you how to get PHP installed and working. He mentions the "all in one" packages that can do a lot of the work for you, but opts to go down the manual route to show you how its really done.

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.

Jaisen Mathai has a helpful hint for those that do any offline work with PHP on their own development systems - how to mirror the PHP manual on a local web server.

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.

Having a development environment on a remote machine (maybe production, maybe test) is nice, but sometimes you just need the speed and simplicity that something a bit more local can give you. Vid Luther talks about setting up just such a local development environment on your Mac. (Sorry Windows guys - maybe check out WAMP)

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.

Leonid Mamchenkov has compared Perl versus PHP in this new blog post - specifically how they handle variable scoping.

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.

Lorna Mitchell shares a quick code snippet she's worked up to make handling local-sensitive dates in PHP a bit easier (via the strftime function).

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).

On the Developer Tutorials blog today, Akash Mehta has posted the second part of his look at the "ultimate web development environment", a continuation from this previous part.

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.

The Zend Developer Zone has an article from Akash Mehta (reprinted from SitePoint) about creating a Yahoo! based mashup combining their search functionality and mapping.

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.