Today, I’m flying to Santa Fe. I have a new fondness for air-travel thanks to a magnificent tool I recently stumbled across. XAMPP is a free, open-source, simple, nearly idiot-proof LAMP emulator that lets me create fully functional drupal sites on my laptop, complete with full database, and php support. The thing even has freakin’ phpMyadmin* installed. You can even switch between PHP 5 and PHP 4, and I also believe you can switch between mysql versions 4x, and 5x with the proper extension. All in all, its increased my productivity astronomically. Its funny – I never bothered to think of how much time I wasted over months watching a status bar move during an FTP transfer. Or – actually, I take it back, that’s not very funny.

Every drupal developer will love the freedom of developing sites locally. Join me in experiencing that freedom.

Download it for Windows here:  XAMPP 1.5.0-pl1

Note:

*I found it quite disturbing that I wrote “Freakin’ PHPMYADMIN!”