XAMPP
If you are developing WordPress sites, or themes then this guide from Podz will help you set up a local server using XAMPP. It sure speeds things up.
One problem I did have was that permalinks didn’t work after following the instructions found in the guides. This is a big problem and I suspect that it has something to do with the rewrite module and/or rules in the .htaccess file. Uncommenting the line in the conf file didn’t work. It left me scratching my head for a day and a half.
Using some google-fu I found a clue in the ModX CMS forum. It seems that the latest version of XAMPP (1.5.1 at the moment) has problems with rewrites. I found an older version to download and all my problems were solved. Here’s a link to version 1.4.16 in case you can’t find it on the site.
