In a new post to his blog Joshua Thijssen gives a guide to how he usually sets up his development environments when working in PHP. It includes working with virtual machines, configuring DNS and setting up his tools to work with it all.

Doing development on multiple projects can be a burden from time to time. One project would be running on PHP 5.3, while another still needs 5.1. Sometimes you need a MySQL server, while on other occasions, you need a NoSQL solution like couchDB or MongoDB together with all kind of gearman functionality. This article shows you how I've setup such a development platform that allows you to quickly create new projects, and still maintain flexibility when you need it.

He uses VirtualBox with either a Debian or CentOS installation as a base platform. He uses Vagrant to set up and configure the machines to make setup almost automatic. He still has to go in and configure a few things like the VirtualHost and DNS settings for the site/application he's working on. Next up is setting up the tools he uses, specifically XDebug and setting up his editor of choice (PHPStorm) for remote debugging.

In this quick tutorial on the Bollysite blog showing how to upgrade your CentOS install of PHP from 5.1 to 5.3 along with xcache.

CentOS 5 comes with php 5.1 version. There is no official PHP 5.2+ release for upgrade since last 3 years. [...] As a result, Developer had to implement alternative functions to integrate twitter, myspace OAuth API. Today wordpress has officially said bye bye to php 4 and mysql 4. So finally, I gathered some courage to mess with my current php installation. I followed the following steps to upgrade php 5.3 on centos 5.

The update requires adding the webtatic repository to your yum setup and using the "enablerepo" to pull directly from that. Once that's installed, you'll need to rebuild xcache to match the version (commands included).

Richard Thomas has posted a script that could be used to set up a complete PHP-enabled instance of CentOS from a basic install. He's posted about it on his blog.

I compile php all the time, I am constantly installing the latest versions on my own servers for various reasons. After doing this the first dozen or so times I started creating little batch files. [...] The other day someone asked something about my setup and I had to pull open the script to remember what I had going on and he asked for a copy and hence I figure others might be interested as well.

He's shared out the file here and it installs all the usual tools you might need including MySQL support with PHP being the only thing compiled from scratch.

Michael Girouard has posted a new guide today about getting PHP 5.2.9 up and running on a CentOS distribution:

CentOS in my opinion is the best way to go in terms of server distros. Some people, including myself, are frustrated at the fact that some software is slow to be updated out of a fresh install: specifically PHP. At the time of this writing, PHP 5.1.6 is the version shipped with CentOS 5.4. While I'm sure they have their reasons for this, I still am required to write somewhat modern apps - 5.1 just doesn't cut it anymore.

He suggests moving away from the compile from source option and "go with the flow" and work with the packages that've already been created. You have to get the testing repository set up first (creating a configuration file to add the name, baseurl and other keys) to be able to use the yum installer tool to grab the latest packages.

With the successful relaunch of the PHPFreaks.com website recently, Daniel Egeberg wanted to share a little glimpse behind the work that it took to get to that place. In this new blog entry, he talks about the technology, code and design aspects they worked through.

I thought that, seeing as this is a programmer community, the people who have not had the privilege to have access to the forums where these things were discussed or access to the code itself might be interested in knowing a bit about the underlying technology and code that powers this website

Some of the technologies they use include the Zend Framework running on a CentOS with PHP5.2. Some of the highlights in the coding process included updates to Zend_Auth, using Zend_Acl for access management, content management and other various packages (like Zend_Feed, Zend_Form, Zend_Db, etc).

PHPFreaks.com has a new tutorial posted that looks to help you protect you and your application with an even greater level of security by using the Suhosin patch.

Suhosin is a great and simple way of increasing your security without having a large impact on overall performance. In this tutorial I will cover the installation and configuration of Suhosin on both debian etch and centos 5. I may cover mod_security in a later tutorial.

They apt-get the packages needed for the patch in examples for two different distributions - Debian (etch) and CentOS. They also show how to set up some basic configuration to get the patch installed and working with your PHP installation.

The HowTo Forge website has a new tutorial CentOS users out there might want to check out. It steps through the installation of a MSSQL database extension for PHP (it's not installed by default) from the yum repository.

As you might have noticed on Centos 5.0, there is no PHP-MSSQL module/extension available in the default yum repositories. So if you want to use it you can alter the PHP binary or you can compile an mssql module/extension. In this article I will explain how to compile the mssql module/extension.

It's a pretty simple process involving only a few downloads (RPM files) and altering the contents of some configuration files to make things work together happily. In the end, you'll have a dynamic extension you can load into your PHP installation whenever you want.

On the HowTo Forge website today, there's a new tutorial with a step-by-step process on installing the PHP-MemCache module onto a system running the CentOS 5.0 operating system.

"MemCached" is a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load. In this howto I explain how you can very easily install it and make it available in PHP.

The process only involves five or six main steps (installation, testing, etc not included) finishing with the loading of the memcache.so file into the php.ini for the system to enable it.

If you're running CentOS 4 and want to get PHP up and running on your installation, check out this quick and dirty guide posted over on the HowToBoard.com.

The process really only involves six or seven steps to get things up and running, but you'll need to know how to get in and edit things before you can build the packages up right. Oh, and of course, a little credit where credit's due:

Enjoy! Do not forget to install new php-pear as well. Special thanks to Peter Zaitsev.