Though not necessary, running PHP on your home machine can make development much quicker and easier. Without affecting the actual website, you can edit files and execute them locally, uploading all to the server when finished. This article will cover the installation of Apache and configuration of PHP on your local Windows machine.

Apache’s .htaccess file options makes it easy to have clean URLs, smart redirects, and even control SSL connections.  In this post, I am going to give you several tips on how you make your web applications smarter.  Note that your server must support mod_rewrite in order to use these tips.