LAMP goes limp - WAMP to the rescue

sigh.

After researching, reading, installing, configuring and getting increasingly frustrated, I have to admit partial defeat.

The quest to build my own database driven webserver has foundered on the reality that you ought to know Linux really well before you try this. The combination of Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP, known as LAMP, does work, and there are a number of different scripts to have it all installed. Ultimately though, you still need to fiddle and tweak, and I am just not comfortable doing that in Linux.

On the off chance that all the work was not in vain, I started looking for the Windows equivalent of the AMP part of LAMP. I was surprised to find that they all existed, and there was actually something called WAMP, which is the Windows equivalent of LAMP.

I decided to start over with the old Dell XPS I have been using for this project, and install a clean copy of XP. I figured I might as well go all the way to SP2 and test out that whole can of worms at the same time. Some additional research and I learned how to create a new install CD with all the patches already "slipstreamed". I'll do a separate entry on this later.

With a fresh OS in place, it was just a matter of running WAMP5, an installation script and .exe package that sets everything up automatically. With that done, it was time to select a content management system to manage the web site.

Much researching later, and when I regained conciousness, I had selected Mambo as the environment. This requires the downloading of another zip file, and the extraction of the PHP scripts into the web server's document directory. After configuring passwords and directories with the admin tools included in WAMP5, and with a final edit of a config file, automagically, a pre-canned web site appears.

With the basics in place, I now have a working web site and content management system in place and accessible across the LAN. Next step is to learn more about how to use Mambo.

More later.