Soon to come though, at some point I want to switch away from WordPress and build this site on PyroCMS. PyroCMS is build on Codeigniter, which I love and know try well. So maybe I can build some plugins for it after I switch over. I’m also learning Backbone.js and Node.js so that should be interesting. Eventually I’ll post code also.

Last time we talked about general Zend Server setup. This time, we will be going through setting up virtual hosts on your local machine. This again will involve Terminal.

This assumes you have Zend Server set up and running. If it is not, go here.

1. Open Terminal. Terminal can be found at /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app

   You can also open it from Spotlight by typing “Terminal”

2. We are going to edit our httpd.conf file. In Terminal type:
   
sudo vi /usr/local/zend/apache2/conf/httpd.conf


   Enter your password if prompted

3. Use the up, down, left, right arrow keys to scroll down to where you see:
   
# Virtual hosts
#Include conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf


4. In Terminal press “i”. This will take you into edit mode to edit the file.

5. Remove the “#” before “Include”. It should look like this now:
   
# Virtual hosts
Include conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf


6. Press the escape key to exit out of edit mode. Press “:x” to save your changes.

7. Now we are going to edit our httpd-vhosts.conf file. In Terminal type:
   
sudo vi /usr/local/zend/apache2/conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf


   Enter your password when prompted

8. In Terminal press “i” to go into edit mode.

9. Use the up, down, left, right arrow keys to scroll down to where you see:
   
NameVirtualHost *:10088


   In the previous tutorial we change the port to 80. So now we have to change this line to read:
   
NameVirtualHost *:80


10. Let’s say you want to have a local virtual host for http://www.super-awesome.local that needs to be pointed at the /Users/YOUR_USERNAME/Sites/super-awesome directory. We need to add the following to the httpd-vhosts.conf file:
    
<VirtualHost *:80>
    DocumentRoot "/Users/YOUR_USERNAME/Sites/super-awesome"
    ServerName www.super-awesome.local
    ServerAlias super-awesome.local
</VirtualHost>


    * Note: .local is just what I picked. You can change that to .dev or .blah or whatever you like. Try to stay away from common domain extensions like .com or .net. And, yes, you can end it with more than one extension like .foo.bar

11. Press the escape key to exit out of edit mode. Press “:x” to save your changes.

12. It’s probably a good idea to make sure we didn’t mess up syntax or spelling. In Terminal type:
    
sudo apachectl configtest
sudo apachectl graceful


    Enter your password if prompted

    If there are any errors they will be displayed to you. Repeat steps 10 and 11 as many times as needed.

13. Let’s go ahead and restart Zend Server so it can get the changes. In Terminal type:
    
sudo /usr/local/zend/bin/zendctl.sh restart


    Enter your password if prompted

14. Browse to either http://www.super-awesome.local or http://super-awesome.local and your site should display

I forgot that yesterday was CSS Naked Day. So when I went to my site, I was pissed that my site was jacked up. My first thought was that my site was hacked. The styling was gone but all of the content was there. Which didn’t make sense why a hacker would do that. That I realized what happened.

That was my first CSS Naked Day that I participated in. It was pretty cool. Click on the image to see a screenshot of my site during CSS Naked Day. Also, a “thank you” goes to Aja Lupas for creating the WordPress CSS Naked Day plugin that I used.

The most common use of .htaccess files is removing file extensions, such as index.php, from a website URL. They are much ore powerful than that though. I’m not going to go into the details about what .htaccess files can do, shouldn’t be used for, best practices, or anything else like that. I’m going to show you how to get .htaccess files set up and working with MAMP.

The only requirements are that you have a Mac (that’s the first ‘M’ in MAMP) and the MAMP software already installed. I am using the latest version. MAMP will install everything else you need (Apache, MySQL, and PHP which is ‘AMP’ in MAMP) to get up and running so you can start making your own sites locally.

First and foremost, the location of your website files in MAMP need to go in /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/ That may sound like common sense but that’s what took the longest for me to figure out. I had my files in /Applications/MAMP/bin/mamp/ which is where all of the files for the start page is located. I just made a folder inside there and was going to the site at http://localhost:8888/MAMP/myfolder No matter what I did, the .htaccess file would not work at all from within that directory. So make sure your websites files are in /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/ or a folder within.

The next thing you need to know is ‘htaccess’ isn’t the file extension and there isn’t a file name on the file. The dot at the front typically means it is a hidden file on Unix based operating systems (which the Mac is). So you will need to show the hidden files on your machine. There are a few ways to do this. One of the easiest ways is to use a Dashboard widget. Hidden Files Widget is a great widget for this. If the hidden files are hidden, the button will say ‘Show’. If the hidden files are visible, the button will say ‘Hide’. It can’t get any more simple that that. Install the widget then click the ‘Show’ button. Sometimes the desktop icons won’t come back automatically. If they don’t come back after a minute, click on the Finder icon in the dock and they should come back. Now, go to wherever your website files are located. If there is a .htaccess file in the folder, skip the next paragraph. If it is not there, read the next paragraph.

Here is the catch. It’s tough to create a .htaccess file because the Mac thinks ‘htaccess’ is the file extension but you didn’t give the file a name. So it won’t just let you do it. WordPress creates a .htaccess file for you when you set up a blog locally. I believe Drupal does the same thing but I’m not 100% positive on that. Other applications possibly do as well. If you aren’t installing a CMS like that, you can always create a custom one and download it. Below is a very basic example of a .htaccess file that I typically use. Once you have a .htaccess file, put it in the root of where your website will live.

The .htaccess file can be opened with TextEdit. You can open it with Dreamweaver or almost anything you want. Here is an example of a typical .htaccess file

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# BEGIN My_Website
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
	RewriteEngine On
	#RewriteBase /
	RewriteBase /mywebsite/
	RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
	RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
	RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
	#RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [L]
</IfModule>
# END My_Website

The hash marks (#) are comments. I’ll talk a little about the second and third commenta in a second.

If you are developing a site locally, your files may not be in the root of the /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/ folder since you may be working on more than one website. That is what the RewriteBase is for. It specifies where the root of your website is in accordance with the root of the domain or local root. In this example, my website and it’s files are in a folder called mywebsite which is inside my /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/ folder. Since /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/ is my root folder, I don’t have to put that in the path. I just have to put the path from the root folder. If you notice, on the line above that (line 4), I have commented out that line with a hash. When you upload the files to your website, uncomment this line (line 4) and comment out the line after it (line 5). That way the .htaccess file works when you get it on the actual site. If you are not uploading the files to the root of your website, set the path accordingly.

The third comment (line 9) is a variation of the line above it (line 8). Both work pretty much the same. You don’t have to have the first and last comment lines. You can delete them and it won’t effect anything.

That is literally all I had to do to get the site working. I saw sites that wanted me to edit httpd.conf files and php.ini files and all kinds of files under the sun. I didn’t have to though. If you do need to mess with those files, there are a couple pretty good walkthroughs to help you out here and here.

[Update] I am adding in some of my previous posts (manually of course), and for some reason Mango Blog had a bunch of my posts in May. I’d say 3/4 of my posts were in May. Which isn’t right. Mango Blog went screwy somewhere.

My site was on a Coldfusion 7 server. So I requested that my host, CrystalTech, move it to a Coldfusion 8 server. I submitted the form and it said it would take up to 24 hours. After I woke up the next day I was excited to start working on the site. The problem was, after 31 hours, they still hadn’t moved it to the new server. So I submitted a ticket asking what the issue was. Apparently they never got the request. I have trouble believing this because I got the confirmation email that the request was submitted. So I had to resubmit the request and wait another 24 hours in order to start working on the site.

Ever since CrystalTech got bought up by Newtek, their server has really gone downhill. Every time I request something to be done, I have to stay on them to make sure they do it. Otherwise they mess it up somehow.