XAMPP for Windows

If you decide to use software on your website such as Wordpress or CMSimple it is a good idea to try them out first without them being visible to the internet. XAMPP is a very useful tool for doing this on your computer.

It installs all of the software and tools that you would expect to find on a webhost on your computer but, crucially, they only work when you ask them to, rather than running all the time.

The core of XAMPP is the Apache web-server software that handles the basic task of sending web pages to a web browser. This includes the PHP language used by many of these Content Management Systems (CMSs).

A comman requirement is for a database to store site articles and settings, so XAMPP comes with MySQL and the phpMyAdmin software for creating databases and accounts.

The Filezilla server gives you the chance to test ftp access to the website for uploading files. Don't confuse this with the excellent Filezilla program. They come from the same publishers but this is the software that Filezilla connects to to transfer files.

There is even an email server, Mercury Mail Transport System.

Set up is straightforward but be prepared to answer some questions in a command prompt window. Once that is done, the XAMPP Control Panel has all of the options to turn the various servers on and off. There are also buttons to access the settings pages.

XAMPP can be set up to run as a service (so it is always available) or as an ordinary program. The latter is more secure as it means the computer is not hosting the website unless you tell it to.

There is a warning on the XAMPP website that Vista users should install XAMPP somewhere other than Program Files to make sure that it works properly. They suggest its own folder such as C:\xampp.