General

For some time now I’ve been using subdomains in XAMPP, here on my own Win10 PC, for a few of my test sites. It obviously makes things much more realistic when testing functionality.

What I didn’t realise until recently, though, was how much easier this can be made by implementing wildcard subdomains. Any folder inside the web document root is automatically available as a subdomain. You just open a browser to ‘foldername.localhost’ and it’s done.

Not sure why I did, but I chanced upon http://www.sintesisdigital.com.mx/dashboard/docs/configure-wildcard-subdomains.html which gives all the details of how to achieve this.

Incidentally, I found that I didn’t even need to update the hosts file, and while I’d have been OK with doing that, it saves even more time.

As someone who has used PHP, MySQL and WordPress to create many web sites and applications, I thought it would be useful to publish some of the information I’ve gathered over the years.

Many of these will be snippets of code, and I’ll try to make sure that they are as generic as possible. I’ve often used the Genesis framework for WordPress, for example, so I may need to publish a Genesis and a non-Genesis version of some code snippets. We’ll see how that goes.

I’m just starting out on this venture, so the site might be a little empty for a short while. Please check back again.