Ioncube is an encryption which many developers use to assist in the prevention of cracking, nulling and outright stealing the code.  Installing iconcube on your localhost development sandbox is pretty simple.  Here I will walk you through the installation of Ioncube on Windows using WAMP.

• Download the Free IonCube Loaders for your PC (machine), by choosing your OS platform. You can download them from HERE
• After you have downloaded it, extract that zip pack to your wamp folder directly. So, that it becomes like this, C:\wamp\ioncube
• Edit php.ini file: C:\wamp\bin\apache\Apache2.2.11\bin\php.ini and add this line at the bottom of the last line: zend_extension_ts = “C:\wamp\ioncube\ioncube_loader_win_5.2.dll”
• Restart WAMP and you are done.

Now, if you want to test,if you IonCube has successfully got installed and set on your server environment, then here is a way to test. Just goto your Joomla Site Admin backend. Goto HELP > SYSTEM INFO > PHP INFORMATION. Scroll down there and you should see something like this:

You can also create a simple php_info.php file.  Simply create a new PHP file and place the following code in it and run it by placing it into your c:\wamp\www\ folder.