Chance Garcia has a recent post to his blog showing how he fixed an issue with his MAMP install involving development of a SSH wrapper he developed and some testing out of PHPStorm and PHPUnit.

One thing I can say is that, even though I use a convenient app like MAMP PRO to set up my local development environment, I'm glad my sysadmin-fu is up to snuff enough to fly without the conveniences because after this ordeal, I feel like I might as well have made my MAMP stack from scratch with all the hoops I jumped tonight.

He shares a few of the things he discovered along the way like: the location of MAMP's "pecl" command, an error caused by a bad pear.conf file, doing custom compiles of PHP and libssh as a fallback and getting the extension to work in the CLI PHP version too.

On the EchoDitto Labs blog there's a new post about getting Eclipse PDT with Zend Server Debugger on MAMP for Drupal (by Jeremy John).

Anything involving Eclipse is always epic. First, you have to get your head around what distribution of it to use, as confusing as one's first introduction to Linux distributions (there are different kinds of Linux?). Next, you have to grok the fact that the Zend Debugger must be installed on your server. In this case, MAMP. Then, you have to make Eclipse listen to the debugging information being outputted, on the debug port. Finally, you have to figure out how to use a debugger effectively (not in scope, but careful, debugging will blow your mind).

After following along with this screencast he was still getting errors when trying to debug (connection failed message). Eventually, though, he finally figured out the problem - an extra zend_extension call to load the XDebug module.

Anna Filina has posted a new item to her blog about some of her experiences with PHP 5.3 on the OS X platform including some of the different software she tried (like the Symfony framework).

I wanted to play with Symfony 2 and so needed to install PHP 5.3 on my OSX 10.5. What seemed like a simple task turned into a huge waste of my time. I use MAMP because it's a nice out-of-the-box solution. The problem is, it still doesn't ship with 5.3 because it's waiting for it to be "stable".

She tried to find a way to upgrade MAMP's installation to the latest stable version of PHP but was stopped by dependency errors and opted to go with XAMPP instead to get more of what she needed. She also has included a few edits to the post with more information - how to migrate your virtual hosts from MAMP to XAMPP and migrating over the MySQL structure.

On the Proof Group's blog there's a recent post about a "gotcha" Andy Chase found when using the Drush command line tool for Drupal installations and a system that has MAMP installed.

Recently, however, I installed MAMP to debug some older, PHP4-specific code. [...] I also use Drush, which is an indispensable Drupal command line tool, and I began getting the following error on some sites: Drush command could not be completed.

This only caused a problem when he went back to his previous PHP5-based installation. He finally found the culprit - a section of the Drush script that looked for MAMP installs and tried to use those binaries and configuration files (the PHP4 ones) instead of his more correct PHP5 ones. A quick commenting later everything worked fine.

On the Content with Style blog today Pascal Opitz has made a (very) quick post about how to get PHPUnit up nd running in your MAMP installation.

In order to run my unit tests, I needed to get phpunit running with MAMP. Thanks to the helpful post of Mark Kirby on this, I figured it out.

The key is in changing the interpreter path in one file and removing a bit of code from another to point to the new PHP binary's path. You'll also need to update your PEAR include path to add in the new pear.conf location.

On the NETTUTS.com website there's a new tutorial posted (by Tarek Farage) about creating your first custom Joomla template:

In this tutorial , you will learn about the basics of a Joomla template, and create one from scratch. We will quickly go through installing a local server and Joomla itself, and then create a basic functioning template.

The tutorial gives you a quick installation tutorial to get you up and running (if you're looking for a PHP installation guide, you'll need to find it elsewhere) with Joomla installed and working. He walks you through each step of the way - creating a simple template, installing it via the admin interface, and adding on more advanced features like layout features and modules.

Gyorgy Fekete has provided what he calls a complete guide to PHP development on Mac OS X in a recent blog entry.

Finally, I switched entirely to Mac. It is a little frustrating that there is not a complete resource on how to set up a web development enviroment on Mac OS X. The majority of tutorials are outdated. I will try to write this guide as complete as possible.

The guide provides basic installation instructions for PHP, MySQL (XAMPP or MAMP), the configuration of these two packages, throwing XDebug in to help with your debugging, installing Subversion and picking out your IDE of choice. He also suggests a somewhat optional step - setting up a Windows virtual machine to be able to test things out cross-platform without the need for a separate machine.

On the Developer Tutorials blog, there's a new post showing you what all you'll need to install to work with WordPress offline "like a pro" on your local machine.

I used to work off of my web server but the problem I've had lately is that when I'm not connected to the internet I haven't been able to code for Wordpress in a way that allows me to view my changes. Since I started using the techniques used in this tutorial my productivity has increased significantly.

His method has you install MAMP on your local machine (for the Windows users, WAMP is just about as easy to set up) and how to import content over from your remote server to the local machine. Of course, you could just set up a subversion repository, but that's another tutorial...

Felix Geisendorfer shows, in a new blog post today, how to setup XDebug (the popular debugging extension for PHP) on a Mac OSx (or Win32/Linux) system.

One of the biggest obstacles when getting started with Xdebug was that I had a hard time finding good instructions on how to set it up on Mac OS X (I finally got rid of windows, yeah !). The only good resource I found was stored in Googles cache (wasn't live anymore) and had instructions on how to manually build xdebug from source.

His is a four step process of installing XDebug support on his MAMP setup - including a few configuration directives you'll need to apply to get XDebug support included.

Stefan Mischook has taken a little time out from his beginner's guides to PHP to post today about the simplest way to set up PHP and MySQL on a Mac - MAMP.

In my beginners php videos, I recommended XAMPP as the way to easily install Apache, PHP, MySQL on a MAC. [...] This nifty little application allows you to (really easily) install Apache, PHP and MySQL. You are provided with a standard DMG file that you simply drag to your applications folder.

He includes screenshots, details on what the package contains, sample code using it and, of course, the Dashboard widget to start and stop the Apache and MySQL servers.