MAMP & WordPress

Wow. I am really not enjoying the process of setting up a local database for site testing. The step by step guides on WP are not exactly intuitive and every tutorial I've looked at seems to not run into the same hiccups as me. For instance, why the heck do I have to go into my Activity Monitor and quit the MySQLd each time I restart the servers? And why when I follow every single instruction to I find myself still unable to access the files in my document root through MAMP?

*pulls out hair* I am going to be bald by the time I figure this out.

It would probably be helpful to understand the guts of what's actually going on in my computer for this, but Google searches are turning up very little for me.

Does anyone know of a good resource for using MAMP with WordPress? This seems way more complicated than it should be considering it's meant to be the easy solution.

Well, the plan was to get a feel for how wordpress works and just how much I would be able to do with it before investing in a host. It seemed like playing with it's features locally was the practical next step. I'm not sure if it's really what I want, after all.

I'm planning on integrating a bit of freeware javascript into the site as well as perusing my options with the WP plugins. I want to get a strong feel for how all of the features work before making anymore major investments, but since I've wasted the entire day trying to get MAMP to work, I might as well just shell out the 6 bucks to laughing squid and skip this ridiculously time consuming step.

Tirj, I did all of that, but when I attempted to open the folder containing the wordpress files it would always bring up a connection to server error. Shortly afterwards the phpAdmin page stopped working.