You can create Joomla! websites just a­bout any­where; there are thou­sands of com­mercial web­hosting ser­vices to showcase your work to the world.  You can also host your websites using your own personal computer (before put­ting them “out there” on the world wide web).  So why do so many seem to have people have trouble maintaining their Joomla! websites?

There are many products you can install on your PC—de­pen­ding on the operating system—such as Wampserver, XAMPP, MAMP, LAMP.

See also Technical Requirements; for a com­pre­hen­sive list of additional PHP environmental settings used with Joomla, please see Optional Technical Requirements for J! 3.x or Optional Technical Requirements for J! 4.x (whichever applies to your particular circumstances).  Note that some of these “optional” requirements are actually needed!

I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve seen people begging for help on technical forums, saying, “I created a J! website and everything was fine until I tried to add a new extension (or update the software … or change something).  What could possibly be wrong?”  When we find out more about their hosting environment we discover that it’s a shambles.  Everything was not “fine” to begin with; if they’d made a couple of small changes to the hosting environment they wouldn’t have the mess that they now have.  Does this sound like you?  Would you like to know about four important PHP settings that can mean the difference between happy webcrafting and tear-your-hair-out frustration and misery?  If this sounds like you this article may just be a life-saver.

I’ve written before about a few of the important things people can do to maintain their Joomla! websites.  Let’s summarise a few important PHP settings that determine whether you can maintain your J! website or whether you can’t.  The following table lists those settings (and my recommendations for how you should use them):

Next up, “Memory Limit = -1” …