First of all, if you'd rather use the .htaccess than the php.ini capabilities of a phpsuexec environment, then shame on you. But, we have some customers who are terrified of php.ini and would rather use the .htaccess. So what? Ok, well there is a workaround.

The connecting piece is the htscanner extension - she includes installation instructions and how to include it into your PHP installation (as well as how to set the PHP values in the .htaccess).

The first releases of the new 0.8.x have published earlier this week (0.8.1 is the latest). The main change is the full support of PHP4. I will support it as long as PHP.net maintains it. The ability to keep htscanner loaded while using PHP CLI is now possible without having to tweak the configuration (useful if you use a single php.ini for both cli and cgi).

You can find out more about the htscanner extension on its PECL homepage and more about the sponsor helping Pierre make this support possible - widexs.nl

Htscanner reports error during module or request init (returns FAILURE), these errors may be fatal and stop the current executions. This behavior is not desired if you use it in a shell ((if you have only one system php.ini for both cli and cgi or if htscanner is compiled statically). This release brings a new ini settings to solve this problem, stop_on_error.

The solution involves changing the htscanner setting to 0 instead of 1 to return a "SUCCESS" message rather than the errors.

The 0.6.3 releases have two important fixes:

• Possible erroneous ini value length have been fixed
• The fatal errors have in module and request initialization have been replaced by warnings

He also mentions the work being done to create a package similar to htscanner for those still working with PHP4. You can get this latest download from the package homepage and get the full details on what changed from its Changelog.

Yet another PECL release, htscanner 0.6.2 is out. This release fixes a annoying but minor bug in the shutdown function. A new error message has been added when no translated path has been found.

And, for the zip package:

Thanks to Ron Korving and post. The fixes have been commited already, 5.2.1 will contain them.

The you can grab this latest update from the zip package's homepage over on the PECL website.

0.6.1 has just been released. It is a bug fixes release only. One leak and some string optimizations. See the full changelong here.

You can get this latest build and the latest information on the htscanner package from it's PECL homepage.

htscanner 0.6.0 has been released. It caches the ini settings instead of looking for htaccess files in the current directory and its parents. The performance impact is yet minimal.

A new ini setting was also added, htscanner.default_ttl, to give the lifetime of the cache. You can get this latest version of htscanner from its PECL homepage.

The first two concern the htscanner package - first, the initial release of the extension that works to emulate htaccess support for non-Apache web servers (like FastCGI or lighttpd). The second related post notes that that Windows binaries for the functionality are also posted on the pecl4win website.

Next on his list were some update to the Zip PECL package, a fix to correct issues found when using PHP versions 5.1.0, 5.1.1, and 5.1.2 (due to an internal function name issue).