Zend on XAMPP on localhost on Windows

I learned to use the MVC psuedo design pattern through codeigniter. MVC seems to be commonly used through the Zend Framework. I learned PHP through a Zend course and was keen to have the Zend MVC Framework on my XAMPP localhost server. So I followed the instructions from the Zend website, which weren't great.

First of all, before you begin the tutorial from the Zend website, you already have the Zend Framework on XAMPP. It's in the PEAR directory. So you just need to replace this with an up to date version.

The other thing you need to replace is zf.bat, which lies within the php directory.

Another thing you need to do before reading the Zend instructions is edit your hosts file. Here are a couple of lines from mine:

127.0.0.1       quickstart.local
127.0.0.1 localhost


Now. Here is the crucial one. If you follow the Zend instructions to the letter, you are left with a localhost which only works with the Zend Framework. You don't want this. What about all the times you are not using Zend?
So, you need to use 2 ports for your localhost. One for Zend and one for everything else. Then you can set
up your VirtualHost entries within httpd.conf like these:


Listen 80
Listen 8080



<VirtualHost *:8080>
    ServerName quickstart.local
    DocumentRoot C:\xampp\htdocs\quickstart\public
    SetEnv APPLICATION_ENV "development"
    <Directory C:\xampp\htdocs\quickstart\public>
        DirectoryIndex index.php
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName localhost
    DocumentRoot C:\xampp\htdocs
    SetEnv APPLICATION_ENV "development"
    <Directory C:\xampp\htdocs>
        DirectoryIndex index.php
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

You can then go to your web browser and use :
http://quickstart.local:8080/ for Zend and
http://localhost/ for everything else.

SMTP from XAMPP on a localhost using your Google mail Account

This may seem a little obscure but believe me, this blog could save you a lot of time.

Imagine you have XAMPP installed on your Windows computer as localhost. You are writing an application which requires e-mails to be sent and you need to test your code. You have a Google e-mail account and you'd like to use the SMTP service which comes with that.

Let's start by creating our little PHP script which we are going to use for testing.

<?php  
    mail('jimmy@googlemail.com','test subject','test body');
?>
There. That wasn't too difficult was it.

Next we need to edit our php.ini file. The php.ini file will be in something like C:\XAMPP\php. We are looking for the [mail function] variables. For which we need entries like this:

[mail function]
sendmail_path = "C:/xampp/sendmail/sendmail.exe -t"

Couple things to note from above. The smtp_port and look carefully at the slashes of the sendmail_path.

Now we are on to our final step. We need to edit sendmail.php which would be under something like C:\XAMPP\sendmail. You need to replace the contents of the file with something like this:


[sendmail]
smtp_server=smtp.googlemail.com
smtp_port=587
error_logfile=error.log
debug_logfile=debug.log
auth_username=myaccountname@googlemail.com
auth_password=mypassword
force_sender=myaccountname@googlemail.com



You must now restart your Apache service in order for it to work.

Now to test your script. Open up your web browser and load it like this http://localhost/myscript.php
Check your Google mail account to see if it's arrived.

Good luck!