We are going to walk through the steps that it takes to start developing Joomla 1.5 on your Macintosh computer using MAMP. The first step is to install MAMP on your Macintosh computer. MAMP was created by Living-e AG primarily as a PHP development environment for the Macintosh computer. It is free and released under the GNU General Public License.
It is the fastest and easiest way to emulate a web server environment right on your computer. It's a lot easier than setting up the Apache web server along with the SQL and PHP packages that are needed to run dynamic database web applications on your computer. MAMP is an abbreviation that stands for: Macintosh, Apache, Mysql and PHP.
To date the current version of MAMP is 1.7.2. It was published on August 27, 2008. The download is a universal binary dmg file approximately 130 MB in size. Click Here to go and get a copy of MAMP. You are going to need Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or higher to run MAMP.
Here is what is in MAMP 1.7.2:
- Apache 2.0.59
- MySQL 5.0.41
- PHP 4.4.8 & 5.2.6
- APC 3.0.19
- eAccelerator 0.9.5.3
- XCache 1.2.2
- phpMyAdmin 2.11.7.1
- Zend Optimizer 3.3.3
- SQLiteManager 1.2.0
- Freetype 2.3.4
- t1lib 5.1.1
- curl 7.18.2
- jpeg 6b
- libpng-1.2.18
- gd 2.0.34
- libxml 2.6.32
- libxslt 1.1.24
- gettext 0.17
- libidn 1.9
- iconv 1.11
- mcrypt 2.5.8
- YAZ 3.0.6 & PHP/YAZ 1.0.14
Once you have downloaded MAMP unpack it and put the folder called 'MAMP' in your Applications folder. Everything that you need to run Joomla 1.5 is in that folder.
Launch MAMP by double-clicking the application icon. You'll see the program start up screen and a green indicator will appear beside 'Apache Server' and 'MySQL Server' to indicate they are running. A web browser start page should open up that says 'Welcome to MAMP'. The address will be http://localhost:8888/MAMP/?language=English in your browser.
Before you go any farther, go back to the MAMP control panel. This is the startup screen. Click on the 'Preferences...' button, then click the 'PHP' tab in the next window. Click the radio button for PHP 5 and then the 'OK' button. MAMP will restart it's Apache and SQL servers. Joomla 1.5 is best run with PHP 5. Most modern web applications have moved to Version 5 of PHP.
Visit the MAMP folder in your Application folder and locate a folder inside called 'htdocs'. This is where you will put all your Joomla installations. You will be able to have as many Joomla sites as you want inside that folder. You'll likely have many different Joomla websites that you will be working on and you can keep them all separate by having them each in their own folder inside 'htdocs'.
Next step: Installing Joomla 1.5 on your local Macintosh using MAMP.