WAMP, MYSQL Workbench.

Building Joomla websites gives you a big advantage over the wordpress crowd because Joomla gives you a lot more freedom to express yourself. I've seen some nifty wordpress sites but in the main wordpress users have to go to extremes to produce something as versatile as a Joomla site.

The trade off is the learning curve. Mastering Joomla is a steep learning curve, This is a Ferrari to wordpress' Mondeo. They both do the job but wordpress has limitations for designing advanced affiliate sites and Joomla gets there in style with ooomph to spare. You just need to make sure you can control the beast to arrive at your destination

I'm not "anti" wordpress by any means. In many cases if you just want to get a blog up and refine it over time then wordpress is the tool for the job. In fact for beginners it's definitely the place to start because you can get going easily.

Anyway, after five years or so of using Joomla and recognising that using an advanced CMS was the key to affiliate success I've started to think about how this shit is going to progress and now it's time to start bringing it all together.

New reader tip: Place the following in a .htaccess in your administrator directory to stop people trying to gain access:

Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Allow from 236.146.61.160
Allow from 236.155.83.220
Allow from 82.37.226.135
Allow from 236.155.83.220
Allow from 82.37.228.1236
Allow from 236.156.109.191
Allow from 236.146.60.109

Of course you substitute your IP addresses that you access from for the IP's above.

The above example is from my .htaccess and so I have two access points allowed, one from the office and one from home. It's a pain to have to update the .htaccess when you reboot your router and it gets a new IP but it's much better to have that small aggravation and sleep well at night than suffer like these guys

I've been looking at how I can improve the getyourbeton.com site and it seems that I need to add a lot more offers and keep them updated regularly to make any headway and that's when I started to think that I need to manipulate the database in a more direct fashion rather than spending ages with the Joomla administrator panel.

That's when I decided that I would replicate all of the sites on my PC and install a WAMP. Once you start taking time seriously you start to think deeply about ways that you can save it because you have so little available and developing locally will save a lot of time. Once I started looking at it I found that some of the tools have been updated dramatically over the past couple of years in particular MYSQL Workbench which makes admin of the database a cinch.

Storebuilder Blog - Productivity