• PHP 4 or 5? - if you haven't made the switch to PHP5, there's no better time
• Linux/Apache - Windows is largely an ASP.NET platform
• Access to outside the document root - it can be very useful for templates, config files and the like
• Scripting requirements - be sure anything you might need for an outside application (like WordPress) is there
• General advice

There's a bit more detail on each of the points to round out the advice.

The Zend Framework has a pretty good OpenID library. I was looking for a library written for PHP5 (strict), and this seemed like a good choice...

He mentions some of both sides of the argument - (the good) the flexibility of the library to work with different backend storage methods and (the bad) the requirements it has for the Zend Framework sessions system for authentication.

For a couple weeks now we kept on saying that we need a checklist of what we need on a server in order to make the site run - now since we setup the neato bonito cluster last week the checklist all of the sudden had a higher priority and I took an hour or so to create that last night.

The code loops through the loaded extensions (get_loaded_extensions) and runs a shell_exec on a directory to see if the requirements are met.

In an effort to learn more about IIS (which a number of my students and contracting contacts seem to use), I have decided to challenge myself: To design, build, and launch a PHP based site, and receive at least 1,000 unique visitors a day by Feb 28, 2008, served from an IIS7 server.

Among his assets are a license to use the IIS software and a designer help with the look and feel. He also sets out requirements for the project including a local testing server, the public web host and that PHP has to be used (not something like phlanger).

This year's Packt Publishing awards for the best Open Source CMS are on their way, starting middle of July. I've been selected as a judge in the PHP CMS category. [...] How can one judge something as diverse and liquid as a CMS? Content management comes in all different shapes, some systems focus on solving some problems and they do a better job than another CMS that mainly tackles different types of problems.

He shares the experiences he's had with CMS and companies that have rolled their own in the past as well as a small list of things that he's thinking about making "the standard" for the CMSes to be judged by. Also included is a lengthy list of requirements that he sees that need to be included for any decent CMS to move to the next level.

To aid you, I have put together this guide which covers *every* default extension that comes with PHP5 and tells you how to get it working on Windows, what dependencies they have and also some vital tips on how you need to arrange your php.ini file and file system to ensure a painless set-up and no messy DLL conflicts.

He lays it all out in a series of two steps - getting everything all set up to make it work (including the value for the extension_dir setting and how to change your PATH variable) and the list of extensions and the DLL files they require.