getting a local wordpress installation

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I spent this evening installing wordpress locally to have an offline playground. I already had an Apache 2.2 web server. So, next I installed MySql 5.1, used the command line tool to create a database (create database wordpress;) and then tried to install WordPress. But there I stumbled across two problems:

First, trying to run the install.php resulted in the following error: "Your PHP installation appears to be missing the MySQL extension which is required by WordPress".

But I had properly configured the MySql extension:

• uncomment the lines “extension=php_mysql.dll” and “extension=php_mysqli.dll” in php.ini
• configure the correct path to C:\php528\ext (or wherever you installed php) in extension_dir in php.ini
• copy libmysql.dll to to C:\WINDOWS\system32 (not nice, probably adding the correct path of the DLL location in the PHP directory to the windows PATH variable would work too)

But I still got the error message. The reason was that  php.ini has to be copied to C:\Windows.

Now I could run the install.php and everything installed, but trying to open the blog just gave me a directory listing. It took me some time to find out that the following line has to be modified in httpd.conf:

DirectoryIndex index.html index.shtml
to
DirectoryIndex index.html index.shtml index.php

This tells Apache that index.php is a proper index page. Now I have a local version of the blog for playing around with layout and styles etc. before applying any changes to my online blog.