Hi,

I guess you could call me the newest newbie so bear with me when I make mistakes in technical terms, etc.
background: just started building my website with Bluehost (bluehost.com : linux server, php 4.X 5.X if requested, MySQL, apache) for the purpose of sharing pictures of my newborn with families/friends overseas then after getting my site up and running, naturally I wanted to expand the useablilty (i.e. add interactivity... BB, forum, login feature and such). I have MS Windows XP Prof and Dreamweaver MX 2004, PhotoShop CS2.

Now the question: Do I need to install PHP, MySQL, Apache on my system in order to preview or is there a way to preview PHP pages on the server using dreamweaver?

Any comment would be greatly appreciated

    Get XAMPP for windows and you will have a server with Apache, MySQL and PHP and Perl all setup and ready to go. Then you can test on your localhost by putting your new documents HTML or PHP or both in the htdocs folder which will be created with the install and you can run the programs locally to debug or get them the way you like and when satisfied just upload them right from your htdocs folder to you web server ready for use.

      your htdocs folder is located in the folder under C:\ where you installed xampp.

      -just a note===

        Actually with a default install of the latest XAMPP it would be c:\Program Files\xampp\htdocs

          Houdini, I wasnt sure, I ran Xampp a while back.

          Thanks for the path

            No, you should get a Linux server. Don't expect that an application developed on one operating system will work on a completely different one.

            • PHP's mail() is implemented totally differently on win32
            • Filesystem layout is totally different
            • Filesystem has a different set of permitted characters, case sensitivity etc
            • Permissions system is totally different
            • Different path separator character

            To mention just a few.

            Don't expect an application to work cross-platform. Any non-trivial app won't.

            Mark

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