For many years EasyPHP has been my personal choice when it comes to website local test system mainly for its simplicity. I chose EasyPHP despite many other people recommended WAMP or XAMP which I actually tried and did not like.

However EasyPHP was not a system without some minor glitches and I’ve quietly wished for a better system as alternative. I have tested a few other systems but none could offer a better performance and ease of use.

So one day while trawling DigitalPoint forum I found a mention of Vertrigo Server and decided to give it a go.

As usual, I downloaded the system from SourceForge and started the installation. Everything worked ok so far.

I then decided to see if it can handle Drupal 7 first as this was one of my headache in EasyPHP.

Ouch! my first problem – what’s the password for mySQL? A quick search in Google reveals the password so I was good to go. If needed, these are the default parameters:

Database Host : localhost,
Database Username : root and
Database Password: vertrigo

I created a database to use and run Drupal install. After a few steps another problem cropped up as I got this error:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted…

Another Google search pointed to a memory allocation setting issue in php.ini. I then increased the limit to 32MB and restarted the server.

The installation process continued and voila! its finished successfully! So far so good and I had my first taste of Drupal 7. Ummm it looks quite differently to Drupal 6 and earlier ones. I hope it was not just look and I expect the new system should be better throughout.

I played around for a while and notice some changes have been put in place notably the use of javascript (I think) in a lot of screen displays. So there’s less screen refreshes required which means faster turnaround speed.

Ok ok, back to Vertrigo. As of now it passed my first test with Drupal and looks set to take over the place from EasyPHP. I’ll see if it deserves to hold the title for sometime to come.

Feel like trying for yourself? Go get Vertrigo Server now, it’s free!