Joomla not working on Localhost:8000
After further research, I saw that Joomla 3.x does not work with php version 5.6 (which is what I was using)

If you are having this issue, I recommend using Homebrew to get php 5.4 or 5.3.

I did the following:

brew install php54


In one terminal tab, I have php5.6 running with the following command:

/usr/local/Cellar/php56/5.6.7/bin/php -S localhost:8000


In another terminal tab, I have stable php 5.4 running with the following command:

/usr/local/Cellar/php54/5.4.39/bin/php -S localhost:8001


(Both have the same document root (website folder) so both can access MySQL just fine.)

So going to http://localhost:8000/ will go to my php 5.6 server while http://localhost:8001/ will go to my php 5.4 server.

Joomla is working like a charm on my php 5.4 test server.

I suppose it should have been common sense to use a more stable version of php rather than the newest one but hopeful this helps someone!