Phil Sturgeon has a new post to his blog about what he sees 2012 as being for the PHP community - the year of cloud hosting with all of the platform-as-a-service companies that have started up over the last year.

Cloud hosting is nothing new. Seeing as "cloud" is such a loosely used term some will consider their VPS solutions on Slicehost or Rackspace to be "cloud hosting". That is partially true, but this article covers how PHP is getting some serious attention in the PaaS (Platform as a Service) field. This year you will almost certainly find yourself making the decision wether or not to move some of your applications and services across to the cloud, and this article can hopefully help you work out why and how.

He talks a bit about how the idea compares with Ruby's Heroku hosting service and some of the benefits that come with it:

• Speedy deployments
• Security
• Scaling

He also looks forward to the future, mentioning some of the major players in the PHP PaaS space like Orchestra.io and App Fog (as well as a brief suggestion of a possible PHP beta over at Heroku).

On the php|architect site today Keith Casey has posted a recording of an interview with Boaz Ziniman of Zend about one of their latest offerings, phpcloud - a platform-as-a-service to provide easy, scalable PHP application hosting.

At the tail end of ZendCon 2011 in October, I managed to corner Boaz Ziniman to chat on the launch of their new product phpcloud. We covered features, limitations, design & implementation considerations, and how it's different than most of the other options out there.

If you'd like to listen, you can grab the mp3 here. It's about 15 minutes long. You can find out more about Zend's cloud offering on phpcloud.com.

In a new post to his blog today Kevin Schroeder answers a question about a product his employer, Zend currently offers - what is phpcloud.com?

Well that's a stupid question, isn't it? It's "Development done right", "Fast, Elastic, Dependable" and on "Any Cloud", right? If you are unclear as to what phpcloud.com is, what the Zend Application Fabric is and what the DevCloud is then this is a good post for you.

The phpcloud platform offers their own Zend Application fabric to provide resources based on the needs at the time and the DevCloud, a "slice" of these resources for you to try out for your development.

So, the Fabric is the loom, DevCloud is a thread spool and phpcloud.com is the lever you pull to start.

Hasin Hayder has put together a list of cloud hosting providers that are already set and ready to go for PHP applications. His list highlights a few of the free ones.

I will be focusing on some of these free cloud hosting options available out there. One thing to note before you proceed - these free cloud hosting options are very good to develop and test your applications (in dev+staging environment) and it may not be wise to deploy the production version of your application with any free plan (Except Amazon AWS's free tier, its production ready).

He has four different services on his list, ranging anywhere from small to industrial strength, depending on your needs:

• Amazon's AWS
• PHPFog
• PHPCloud (from Zend)
• Heroku (traditionally Ruby, now supports PHP too)

The ServerGrove blog, a hosting provider whose services include shared hosting, has posted a guide to help you deploy to shared hosting with Capifony, a Symfony-based tool for use with Capistrano.

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).

Christian Weiske has a new post about a move the phpfarm tool has made over to SourceForge for its project page. phpfarm makes it simple to switch between multiple versions of PHP on the same server to make debugging and development a much simpler task (especially if you're not in a homogeneous environment).

phpfarm, the tool that lets you install multiple PHP versions beside each other, finally got a proper project page on SourceForge. By moving from svn.php.net to SF, phpfarm got a nice git repository, a wiki and a ticketing system. It also has a Phing build file now which generates and uploads release files, so people don't have to install git to get phpfarm.

His post also includes some of the changes made in the latest release (0.1.0) and how you can clone the code from the SF.net repository.

On his blog Martin Sikora shares a solution that many a Symfony developer out there might find handy for running their application in a shared hosting environment:

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.

On the RandomBugs blog today there's a new post looking at some of the considerations made when setting up Apache and PHP for dynamic virtual hosting.

It's been a while since I configured the latest Dynamic Mass Virtual Hosting Server. Last time I used mod_vhost_alias to create a dynamic virtual hosting and it worked without any problem for what we need in that time. [...] Now, the problem is a little bit changed: We need a secure sever which should support ftp virtual users with quota and we don't have permission to change the packages, apply patches or recompile sources, because we need to be able to upgrade without to much stress.

Their biggest problem was dealing with the virtual users and handling the security for them to work with the files and hosts set up for them and only them. They tried both suPHP and a combination of mod_vhost_alias/php safe_mode/openbasedir but neither fit their needs. In the end it was mod_macro that did the trick with one caveat - you had to be more careful when adding the host to use the correct syntax in the configuration. It's split between multiple files and settings have to match across them.

On the php|architect site today Beth mentions a contest that's being put on by the WestHost hosting group is putting on to find the best function - custom bits of functionality that are the most impressive and do their job the best.

Submit your entry by March 15th to win one of the above prizes. Winner's will be selected from a panel of judges reviewing the top rated PHP functions / code based on utility, creativity, efficiency, and readability. Make sure to get the word out about your submission in order to get votes to have a chance to win.

The submission form lets you fill in your contact details and copy & paste in the function. You can use any version of PHP you'd like and even the framework of your choice (just be sure it include instructions on its use).

On the ServerGrove blog today there's a new tutorial posted showing you, step by step, how to install the bbPress software (from the folks that brought you WordPress.

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.