I've been supporting over 80 MediaWiki wikis and half a dozen or so Wordpress blogs at Intuit, Inc. I started out on a couple of old Dell PCs with Mandrake. When they were overloaded, and that didn't take too long, I moved to an HP DL360 XEON Dual Processor server with 4 gig of RAM, redundant BIOS, 37 gig RAID 1, etc... A nice box.

So when the need arose to setup a server for another group, I dusted off one of those old Dells and decided to figure out how to do it right - with all the latest versions of Apache, MySQL and PHP, and all working together nicely. It took me a few days to figure out, but I finally have a clean, working system.

They walk you through each step of the way, explaining what to get, where to get it from, how to install it, and what needs to be configured to get it all playing nicely together. They compile the PHP with a lot of extensions enabled - some not really needed by "normal" installs - but it's always good to have options. By the end, you should have a nice, fully-functional installation with a working web server that groks PHP.]]> Wed, 15 Mar 2006 13:07:36 -0600 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4976 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4976 reports that the latest PHP release candidate has been posted by Ilia - PHP 5.1.3RC1.

Ilia Alshanetsky, release manager of PHP 5.1, has published the first release candidate of the upcoming 5.1.3 version of PHP. It's mainly a bug fix release, but the PCRE library was updated to version 6.6 and the CGI interface has been updated quite a bit as well. Other items improved included updates to the SPL, Reflection APU, cURL support and the GD functionality. The SimpleXML engine was also updated to allow for the use of namespaces with the addChild and addAttribute functions.

You can grab this latest release candidate from Ilia's site and you can check out the Changelog here.]]> Mon, 13 Mar 2006 07:19:59 -0600 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4882 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4882 this new post showing how to correct an issue that a PHP/MySQL install has with the OS X version 10.4.

I recently upgraded my mac to OS 10.4. Overall I've been pleased. Recently I decided to fire up PHP and mySQL and ran into some trouble.

Everything was moving along nicely - until I tried to connect to my database from a PHP page. To make a (really) long story short, a bunch of research revealed that since OS 10.4, the PHP install tries to connect to mySQL via the socket: /var/mysql/mysql.sock, but mySQL uses /tmp/mysql.sock. So they won't talk to one another. The trick is to change your php.ini to point to /tmp/mysql.sock.

Included is also a mini-guide to getting PHP working on OS X, and how he solved his problem (where to find the php.ini and change the value it needed).]]> Wed, 22 Feb 2006 07:06:10 -0600 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4669 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4669 this latest post on PHPMac.com today, there's a step-by-step guide on how to install Apache 2.2.0 and PHP 5.1.2 together on one of the latest versions of Mac OS X - 10.4.4.

For anyone that has been wishing to switch to Apache 2 on their Mac, this is the time to do it. PHP 5 has also recently been updated to 5.1.2 and this tutorial describes in detail, the best method to both build and install these programmes on your Mac.

Since Apple don't include Apache 2 with OS X yet I have felt it better to keep Apache 2 in its own directory, and to keep PHP for Apache 2, etc. confined the that directory too.

They a quick new post with a solution for those Mac users out there that would like to use the iconv extension with fink.

If you want to get the iconv extension properly running with PHP 5 and fink on OS X, you need the following configure option

--with-iconv=/sw/

and then it should work.

Hope that helps others, too.

And, apparently, it does - given the one comment below it so far that has a positive response... ]]> Fri, 06 Jan 2006 07:23:47 -0600 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4501 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4501 Mike Naberezny talks about how he optimized Zend Studio on his Mac OS X installation.

Recently, I purchased a Mac mini and started using it as my home computer. Overall, it is a pretty nice little machine but its 1.42 GHz G4 processor isn't the fastest thing out there. On some larger applications, such as Zend Studio, it is a little sluggish. Fortunately, there are two things that you can do with Zend Studio to get an immediate performance increase.

The first of the two is simply changing an option for the time on code completion. The other, however, it a bit more detailed - it requires you to assign more memory to the application by going through some of the system folders...]]> Wed, 14 Dec 2005 07:31:57 -0600 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4400 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4400 PHPMac.com today, they have this new tutorial posted to help you, the OS X (Tiger) user to get Apache 2 and PHP 5.1.1 installed on your system.

For anyone that has been wishing to switch to Apache 2 on their Mac, this is the time to do it. PHP 5 has also recently been updated to 5.1.1 and this tutorial describes in detail, the best method to both build and install these programmes on your Mac.

Since Apple don't include Apache 2 with OS X yet I have felt it better to keep Apache 2 in its own directory, and to keep PHP for Apache 2, etc. confined the that directory too.

As usual, they give you all of the commands and information to get it all unpacked, placed in the right locations, and configured for your setup. There are also a few "frequent issues" down near the end of the tutorial to watch out for during your process...]]> Wed, 30 Nov 2005 07:11:52 -0600 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4335 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4335 this post on DynamicWebPages.de today, the first Release Candidate of the PHP 4.4.2 series has been posted.

Derick Rethans, the release manager for the upcoming PHP version, 4.4.2, has published the first Release Candidate for this series. Those who use PHP under Apache 2 or mod_rewrite right now, are specifically being asked to test this release. There have been reports of failures with this specific setup.

All further changes of the version can be found in the Changelog. Originally, the final version was going to be released on Tuesday. However with the help of a few industrious testers, the few errors can found (like the crashing issue with Apache 2) and taken care of so that the new release candidate shouldn't be far behind.

You can download this latest Release Candidate here...]]> Sat, 19 Nov 2005 05:47:58 -0600