If you want to get up and running quickly using Drupal on Mac OS 10.5 your best bet is to use MAMP, as John VanDyk suggests in his comments. There are MAMP setup instructions on Drupal.org.

But I decided to try moving away from MAMP. One reason is that MAMP doesn’t come with certain features — for example, I’m told that it’s hard to get SSL working. Another is that the upgrade cycle for PHP and MySQL is different from that of MAMP, and I sometimes want to be able to roll my own upgrade on my own timeframe.

As I was setting up a new Drupal site, I decided to try out the hilariously named phpass module. (I cannot read that as “PH Pass” to save my life. It always comes out as… something else.)

The good news about this module is that it builds upon a PHP project called, um, phpass to add better password hashing to Drupal. The traditional way to handle passwords is to ask the user for one, compute a hash function on it, and store the hashed version. Unix systems use the Unix crypt utility to make the hash.

For the last week I’ve been writing a Drupal utility in Ruby. This is a dubious decision, because most Drupal developers would prefer a tool written in Drupal’s native PHP. It’s less hassle to install, and less hassle to modify.

But I went with Ruby anyway, at least for version 0.1 — partly to keep myself in practice, and partly as an excuse to work out with RSpec, the Behavior Driven Development (BDD) framework for Ruby.

With BDD, before you write your code, you write a spec.