The Ideal Drupal Development Environment

The purpose of this sandbox project is to illustrate the steps one might take to set up a local development environment that is ideal for purposes of Drupal development. It is based on the steps described at http://sites.google.com/site/theidealdrupalenvironment. In some ways the goals of this project overlap the goals of the Quickstart project (http://drupal.org/project/quickstart). In both cases the goal of the project is to enable the Drupal developer to use a development environment that is geared for maximized productive usage. The key distinction between this project and the Quickstart project, however, is that the Quickstart project focuses on providing a pre-made development environment, whereas this project focuses on illustrating the process by which one can create an ideal development environment one detailed step at a time. This latter approach is premised on the view that technology is constantly evolving, so the advanced web developer is well advised to invest the time needed to acquire the skills required for effectively coordinating the vast array of tools that are continuously being generated by the open source movement.