The most important lessons in my opinion are caching, tweaking configuration and stress testing.

When taking a look at Google Sitemaps (somewhere under Google Webmaster Tools) I found that WordPress didn't respond to non-existing pages with a 404 not found, but all my pages after each other, rather like the posts on a dynamic front page.

Again I thought - no biggie! I modified the 404.php template to begin with the following:

<?php

ob_start();

header("HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found");

header("Status: 404 Not Found");

...

Still, no luck. Then I saw that WordPress didn't even read the 404.php page! I tried turning off the static front page and voilà, 404 works okay again.

I've searched a bit for this in the WordPress forums, but I'll report a bug ticket for them. Hopefully it will work in the next release

Newsflash:

It only works this way if you haven't chosen a "Posts page". Maybe it's just an undocumented feature?

1. Download XAMPP Installer package.
2. Install XAMPP - this is really just a case of next -> next -> okay.
3. Since I'm not only using my laptop for development I chose not to start any services except for XAMPP when windows starts.
4. Start (from XAMPP Control Panel) Apache and MySQL (and whatever other services you need).
5. Add PHP to your PATH.
   1. Right-click "This Computer", choose properties.
   2. Advanced tab -> Systam variables (not sure, my system is in Swedish )
   3. Add C:\xampp\php;C:\xampp\mysql\bin (if installed in default location) to the PATH variable.
6. Upgrade Pear - pear upgrade pear
7. Find Symfony - pear channel-discover pear.symfony-project.com
8. Install Symfony - pear install symfony/symfony
9. Done! Start playing around...