With the recently released PHP 5.4, the Suhosin patch and extension were removed from many Linux distribution packages (i.e., Debian et al.) and until three weeks ago, there was no possibility to compile and run the Suhosin extension under PHP 5.4. This little howto shall serve as installation instruction for Debian Wheezy users - your mileage may vary. I blogged about this here.

They start with the apt-get commands to install the latest PHP5 for your distribution (yum commands are similar, of course) and includes the location to download the latest Suhosin version from Stefan Esser's github account. Unpack it, compile and "phpize" it and if all goes well, you should have a shared module built and ready for use.

When you send an email, the mailer communicates with a remote server in charge of receiving the message and of delivering it to the recipient. This process can cause your form to submit slowly as it depends on how fast the mail server responds. Spooling allows us to decouple the application execution line from the process of the sending one, two, or as many emails as we need.

They show you how to configure the SwiftMailerBundle with the mail server's settings, how to set up the command to send the emails and the settings you'll need to put in your cron file to run the "send" operation periodically.

Once created, and given proper permissions, other processes in the same machine can manipulate those segments by: read, write, and delete. This means that an application written in C can share information with an application written in other languages, such as Java or PHP. They can all share information, as long as they can access and understand that information. [...] This article's proposal is simple, learn how to create and manipulate shared memory segments with PHP and use them to store datasets that other applications can use.

Your PHP installation will need to have been compiled with "enable-shmop" to work with the code in this tutorial. Their examples show how to use the shmop_open, shmop_write and other related functions to read, write, remove and close segments in the shared memory space. They also include an example of using the SimpleSHM library to make it easier to interact with the shared memory space as a standard storage location.

This article is meant to help you configure and deploy your projects developed with Symfony2 into a Shared Hosting environment, so if you need to deploy using capifony on a VPS, please read this article.

You'll need ssh access to the server to get things set up for the deployment as well as a local environment where you can install Ruby and Ruby Gems (their platform for the example is OSX). They help you get those installed and generate a key for use with the deployment. Once this key is copied over to the remote system, you can then set up the config to use the password-less connection and to deploy from either a local repository or a remote location (like github).

Some time ago (actually when I was making this blog) I posted on stackoveflow.com a question on how to configure Symfony to run on shared webservers where you can't change your website's document root. I solved it but forgot that I was asking and left it without any answer.

The main problem is that the DOCUMENT_ROOT for the hosting service can't be changed by the users of the shared host. To solve this he modified his routing rules (sfPatternRouting class) and changed his .htaccess file to rewrite things over from just "/page" to "/web/page" instead. A simple solution, but it might be evasive if you've never configured it before.

bbPress is a forum software developed by the same folks who created WordPress. It's a lightweight bulletin board system that seems to be gaining traction lately. bbPress runs really well on our shared hosting plans so we decided to put together a quick tutorial on how to install bbpress on our systems.

Despite the description, the guide can be followed to install it just about everywhere thanks to the simple installation process bbPress uses. He links you to the latest download, gives you an example of what you can expect from the installer and talks about setting up the database. This is where is get specific, using their Plesk tool to set it up. This is only to set up the actual database, though - you can do this through any number of tools, including the command line.

Before going on with the points, let me state something: please avoid flame wars, all the Scala vs. PHP stuff, fanboyism and what not. This post is not about that. Regarding Wade Arnold I have to say that I fully respect him. While I don't know him personally, I know him for his work on AMFPHP, since it was a platform I used to work with before.

Alvaro talks about functional programming and some of the main points he had made about Erlang in a talk he had given - code reload, being ready for multi-core and no shared state between scripts. He talks about how these (really) apply to PHP.

When you deploy a Zend Framework website to a shared host, you usually cannot change the DocumentRoot to point at the public/ folder of the website. As a result the URL to the website is now http://www.example.com/public/. This doesn't look very professional, so we'd like to remove it. The easiest way, given a ZF project created using Zend_Tool.

In the index.php file you'll need to define a constant and an .htaccess file to route everything back to that index. You'll need to be aware of this change when working with files and can check in the front controller for that constant to reset the base path if needed (code example included).

To date, Zend Server includes 77 PHP extensions that Zend considers essential or just very helpful for most PHP developers. Still, what if the one that your code uses is not among them? Or you wish to compile one of the extensions Zend Server is shipped with in a different way (against your own libraries or to support additional, less common features)? If this scenario sounds familiar to you, you may find this tutorial useful.

You'll need to know a bit about compiling and some of the tools (like autoconf, automake, the gcc compiler, and libtool) before you get started. Two scenarios are described - one for installing and compiling the Newt extension (RedHat's Newt New Terminal library) and another slightly less automated for the Pspell extension.

Each of these examples make a shared module that can be included into the PHP installation via your php.ini.

In this tutorial I am going to walk you through creating a PHP extension called "vehicles" which will expose a single class called "Car" (obviously in the real-world, your extensions will expose many classes, but I'm trying to keep things simple). The extension will be built for PHP 5. I am only going to give instructions for building the extension in a UNIX-like environment, although most of what I cover should apply to Windows extension development as well.

The tutorial walks you through everything - how the file layout should look, making a build system, the contents of his files (the sample extension lets you do things to the Car like shift gears and brake) and how to combine the C++ code with the build process to create a shared module you can include right in your php.ini.