In Part 1 and 2 of this short series on how to setup your Mac as a web development station I described how to install Entropy PHP, mySQL and XDebug for Mac OSX 10.5. In this last part I’ll look into setting up Eclipse for editing and debugging PHP code. This setup will be helpful when developing custom extensions for Joomla or for just exploring the inner workings of third party components, modules and plug-ins.
There are many extensions that make life easier when “assembling” your Joomla website. The ones described below are used in almost all of my websites. They have become my “infrastructure” friends.
In my last post I described how to setup a development environment on your Macintosh with MAMP. Now we have an “empty” Joomla install with a preloaded template. This is our blank “canvas” upon which we will “paint” our first website.
I have been at this stage many times before and I have developed a routine of installing some “utility” extensions that will make my life easier down the road. My first extension on any Joomla website is JoomlaPack. JoomlaPack is, and here I quote the JoomlaPack site “… a component that creates a site backup which can be restored on any Joomla!-capable server. It creates a full backup of your site in a single archive. The archive contains all the files, a database snapshot and an installer derived from the standard Joomla! installer. The backup and restore process is AJAX powered to avoid server timeouts, even with huge sites. “
JoomlaPack has turned out to be more that just a convenient backup tool. I also use JoomlaPack for transferring sites from one server to another - from my localhost to my production server and vice versa. I will detail the specifics in a future blog. During the development of a site I’ll take frequent snapshots with JoomlaPack so I can always restore to a known good state when an experiment goes a stray…