A question that comes up again and again in web development companies is: 'Should the developers have access to the production environment, and if they do, to what extent?' My view on this is that as a whole they should have limited access to production. A little disclaimer before I attempt to justify this view is that this standpoint is in no way based on the perceived quality or attitude of the developers '" so please don't take it this way.

He talks about common excuses from developers like "we've had access before" and "we need access to troubleshoot" as well as some of the process restricting the access could create. He touches on a few other issues including developer concerns vs those of the sysadmin, change control issues and the responsibilities of the sysadmin administrators if they want to allow the developers to poke around their servers.

Be sure to check out some of the other great suggestions in the comments too!

For those readers who do not develop PHP on Windows platform WampServer is probably the most popular Apache + MySQL + PHP package for Windows. MySQL Administrator on the other hand, is a part of MySQL GUI Tools package. The problem with this pair, is that they don't want to work together. At least not right out of box.

Connecting the two directly does require editing the Windows registry, so if you're a bit hesitant of that, you might look for other ways to administer the MySQL install that comes with WampServer.

With the recent talk on the blogosphere about deployment (and for Django, and lots of other posts too), people are thinking about PHP a bit more analytically. I think people mostly get it wrong.

He points out that PHP, in essence, is a CGI-style execution and, in being so, makes it more flexible. Both sides, web and command line, can work with the language equally well. He also mentions the developer/administrator split he sees in PHP's structure and how the language facilitates it.

• Web Application Engineer (PHP, MySQL, AJAX and all that)
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• and last but not least, local.ch is also looking for talent