One of the best ways to develop Joomla! websites on your personal Mac computer is using MAMP. MAMP is an application that provides all the resources needed to run a content management system. Once you download MAMP to your computer you can install as many Joomla! sites as you have hard drive space for and do all your development and experimenting in this safe environment just as if it was on a live server.

During the installation of Joomla! you are given the option of enabling the FTP layer of Joomla!. You can simply skip this step and Joomla! will run without it. If you want to enable the FTP layer it can be a little confusing what the proper settings are for it in the Joomla! configuration settings of your MAMP localmachine website.

The simplest way to develop a Joomla! site on your local Mac OS X computer is by using MAMP. MAMP is short for Macintosh, Apache, MySQL, PHP. MAMP works just like an application. It is released under the GNU General Public License. You can download MAMP from Living-e AG. The download page can be found HERE.

This article is Step Two, if you missed Step One be sure to check out "Install MAMP to Run Joomla 1.5 On Your Macintosh Computer".

Current MAMP versions require Mac OS X 10.4.x or greater. If you're running Mac OS X 10.3.x you can download an earlier version of MAMP 1.4.1 (universal binary), for Intel and PowerPC.

On Saturday March 28, 2009, the Joomla! project released a security update that will bring Joomla! to version 1.5.10. It is important to keep your Joomla! websites up-to-date and secure and it's as simple as installing a patch update such as this one. As noted on the joomla.org website, this release contains 66 bug fixes, one low-level security fix, and one moderate-level security fix. You can get it HERE.

The patch upgrade takes very little time to do. I updated almost a dozen sites in less than a half an hour with this patch. Don't let your site, or any of your client sites get out of date. Although there was only one low and one moderate-level security risk closed up in this update, it's always smart business to implement an update as soon as possible. The time it takes is short in comparison to fixing a website that has been compromised by a malicious person.

We are going to walk through the steps that it takes to start developing Joomla 1.5 on your Macintosh computer using MAMP. The first step is to install MAMP on your Macintosh computer. MAMP was created by Living-e AG primarily as a PHP development environment for the Macintosh computer. It is free and released under the GNU General Public License. It is the fastest and easiest way to emulate a web server environment right on your computer. It's a lot easier than setting up the Apache web server along with the SQL and PHP packages that are needed to run dynamic database web applications on your computer. MAMP is an abbreviation that stands for: Macintosh, Apache, Mysql and PHP.

Previously on JoeJoomla I wrote a series of articles called 'Web Development On Your Macintosh Computer Using MAMP and Joomla! CMS'. These articles have been very popular and many people continue to send me messages saying that they are the best instructions on how to install Joomla! in a localmachine development environment. The articles were specifically related to the original version of Joomla! 1.0x which is still very much in use on the Internet but no longer officially supported by joomla.org.