Submitted by Jamie (not verified) on Sun, 08/16/2009 - 05:04.
I actually switched from XAMPP to WAMP a few weeks ago and love it. The migration was simple - only taking about 10 minutes. True I have a lot of experience in setting up LAMP servers, so that's a big plus for me.
A few things I can think of that might cause problems:
- mod_rewrite is disabled by default, so people might have problems getting clean urls to work
- there is a difference in paths between Windows and *nix setups. That can lead to some confusion.
- WAMP ships with PHP 5.3. Drupal isn't 100% 5.3 friendly. Best bet is to download PHP 5.2.9.2 and use that instead. If you are using XDebug, then use PHP 5.2.6 since there are problems with PHP crashes and XDebug in Windows on PHP>5.2.6.
To the last point remember if you want to change your php.ini then edit wamp directory/bin/php/{version}/phpForApache.ini. That file is copied over by WAMP when changing PHP versions.
Another thing to keep in mind is that WAMP sets error_notices to E_ALL. A lot of modules out there still throw notices, so go best to change it to E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE. Until D7 is out in the wild for a while and more modules move to full PHP 5 only support, this will probably be needed.
And for the serious developers out there who want to use their own domains I highly recommend installing Treewalk DNS. I have mine setup so that the .devel TLD is my system. I can then quickly setup unlimited sites, and even do wildcard subdomains - great for testing multisite stuff.
This combination of stuff works great on my Vista 64 system.
I actually switched from XAMPP to WAMP a few weeks ago and love it. The migration was simple - only taking about 10 minutes. True I have a lot of experience in setting up LAMP servers, so that's a big plus for me.
A few things I can think of that might cause problems:
- mod_rewrite is disabled by default, so people might have problems getting clean urls to work
- there is a difference in paths between Windows and *nix setups. That can lead to some confusion.
- WAMP ships with PHP 5.3. Drupal isn't 100% 5.3 friendly. Best bet is to download PHP 5.2.9.2 and use that instead. If you are using XDebug, then use PHP 5.2.6 since there are problems with PHP crashes and XDebug in Windows on PHP>5.2.6.
To the last point remember if you want to change your php.ini then edit wamp directory/bin/php/{version}/phpForApache.ini. That file is copied over by WAMP when changing PHP versions.
Another thing to keep in mind is that WAMP sets error_notices to E_ALL. A lot of modules out there still throw notices, so go best to change it to E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE. Until D7 is out in the wild for a while and more modules move to full PHP 5 only support, this will probably be needed.
And for the serious developers out there who want to use their own domains I highly recommend installing Treewalk DNS. I have mine setup so that the .devel TLD is my system. I can then quickly setup unlimited sites, and even do wildcard subdomains - great for testing multisite stuff.
This combination of stuff works great on my Vista 64 system.