Have you ever felt frustrated when setting up a PHP/MySQL development environment on Windows? A new all-in-one installer makes the process easier than ever. Perhaps surprisingly, the package comes from Microsoft.
Our latest tutorial, The Easy Way to Install PHP on Windows sees SitePoint’s own Louis Simoneau putting version 2 of Microsoft’s Web Platform Installer (Web PI) through its paces.
Louis will demonstrate how to install PHP with the Web Platform Installer, and along the way will show how conveniently this tool can pull in different open source software packages and install them for you. You’ll learn, for example, how to grab MySQL, WordPress, and Drupal, and watch the Web PI install them all automatically. And therein lies the beauty of the Web PI—you don’t have to dither around configuring stuff yourself.
Louis also gives us a heads up about some of the other cool features, such as the excellent SEO tool, which can analyze your site or application. It’ll check for broken links and provide recommendations to improve the site’s search engine friendliness and overall performance.
The Web PI also has a caching extension for IIS, which improves web server performance and makes it a serious competitor to Apache for hosting PHP applications. Take a look and see what you think.
A huge thank you to Microsoft, who are our sponsors for the multiple choice quiz for this article—if you find the article interesting, be sure to check how closely you paid attention!
Article: The Easy Way to Install PHP on Windows
Quiz: Web Platform Installer Quiz
Andrew Gardner
