Firstly, thanks for the forum. I'm new to offline servers and XAMPP, so I'm not very intuitive in this area. My real goal here is to setup an offline venue to work on our commerce website, so as not to "break" the live version.
Here's where I've been so far: I've downloaded XAMPP (a number of times, while trying to solve issues), I've installed my site in the htdocs directory a number of different ways (as best as I can make out from the different sets of instrustions available), I've copied the db into MySql and had it somewhat working.
The problems have been:
My site linking back to the live site directly. I DID have this stopped at one point, but it's back on a newer install and I can't get it broken of that this time.
The other problem was that the dynamic links wouldn't work correctly. I don't THINK it was a db problem, b/c I DID get the index page (which calls a lot of other pageloads and files, some from the db, I suspect) to finally work. BUT... EVERY link from the homepage out was broken w/a 404 Object not found. I looked in the error logs, but couldn't make much sense of those b/c they listed a file and said it didn't exist, but it doesn't really exist in the live site, either, but that works.
Please help. I'd be happy to supply any info you need to help. I just don't want to clutter this post with useless info (I've accumulated a TON of that since I've been trying to get this working for days and days).
Thanks a lot,
H