MAMP & CSSEdit
Sometimes IT-technology can be a wonderful thing. Especially when it’s applied properly to a Mac.
As if I have nothing else to do — about 4 or 5 incoming design jobs, my music, my music app development, a bit of life itself, etc — I decided to hack into theme development for Wordpress. I simply need a better theme for this here blog, as slightly changed theme-from-other-devs won’t do it for me anymore. I’m too much of an anal retard for that.
Designing/hacking/changing WP themes is a seriously elaborate effort. These things are complicated, you know. Certainly when it’s someone else’s mess. I’ve been there before on several occasions, and most of the time I can manage. But now I want more and deeper and better, so my handwritten CSS skills (pretty good, if I may say so myself) will not cut it anymore. I need external help.
I’ve been playing with CSSEdit on a few occasions before, and I was always smitten with it. It’s wonderfully styled and adheres strictly to OS X GUI rules. It’s pretty much bug free, very easy to use, and extremely powerful. I could even compare it to Transmit (from Panic Software), one of the best apps for Mac, which speaks wonders about CSSEdit.
When I like an app, and its price-to-usage ratio is acceptable, I buy the app. Just like much anybody else, I used to have a fair share of warez (it’s all about $$$), but lately I’ve been reducing the use of pirated software to an absolute minimum. Most of the time the hassle is just not worth it, and for a design professional like myself having support and free upgrades and stuff pays itself back in hefty dividends. Furthermore, I want to keep my machine as “clean” as possible, since my livelihood depends on it…
So just now I took one more glance at MacRabbit’s website (the makers of CSSEdit, duh), and noticed something I didn’t see before: it’s a Belgian software company ! Located in Antwerp, no less… Needless to say that was the last straw, so I pulled out my PayPal card - so to speak, and proceeded with a monetary transaction. Payment and all that went as smooth as my ass (I’ve heard on several occasions that I have a baby-smooth ass, but other than that you have no business with neither my ass, nor other people’s thoughts about my ass). But I digress…
One of the most annoying problems with weblogging software theme development is that you can’t exactly do it “live”. WP runs off a database which is located on a server, so the edits and changes you make to the design cannot be reflected in real time… You need to first upload the pages to your server, load them in your browser, check, correct where necessary, upload again, etcetera ad nauseam. Not really a productive working environment, I dare to say.
If I could run Wordpress and the database locally, now that would be different.
Apache, PHP, MySQL and all that crap is already present by default in OS X, but it can get quite complicated to set it up properly and run it in a nice working environment.
So then I googled my way into heaven. “wordpress + run locally” instantly turned up “How to setup WordPress locally on your Mac” on Bleikamp’s blog. Yay. 
Which then quickly produced a link to MAMP.
After downloading MAMP (as in, free!), I installed Apache, PhP, MySQL and godknowswhatelse in about 1.3 minutes flat. Installing WordPress and a new (test) database took me no more than 5 minutes. I now have a separate WP blog running, independently from Sweet Cucumber, locally on my Mac, ready to be hacked to smithereens. And the beauty is that MAMP doesn’t interfere at all with my standard Apache and OS X settings…
Sweet.