From TutsWall.com there's a recent tutorial (pretty brief) about getting started with CodeIgniter.

Developing web application from scratch is always a painful task. This where frameworks comes to help us, but learning frameworks will at-least take some decent learning curve. But there are some frameworks that is very easy and fun to learn and develop applications and CodeIgniter is of of them.

They cover the download of the framework, ensuring it's working by hitting the main page and creating a simple controller and view to show you where some of the pieces go.

In the latest post to her blog Lorna Mitchell talks about some of the issues she had when upgrading to the latest version of SugarCRM (6.0.0).

I noticed that SugarCRM have just released their new version 6.0.0, and since my sugarcrm installation is madly out of date and I'm about to start using it again, I thought I'd just throw the old one away and install from scratch. I had no problems until I reached the final installation stage, when clicking the "install" button would return a 404.

After running through things a few times more, she finally corrected the cause of some of the errors of this final step - increasing the memory_limit setting, upload_file_size as well as installing cURL support for PHP. With these changes, the install worked perfectly.

The PHPFreaks.com website has posted a recent tutorial looking at a tool that can help you protect you and your web applications from possible malicious users - PHPIDS.

PHPIDS (PHP-Intrusion Detection System) is a simple to use, well structured, fast and state-of-the-art security layer for your PHP based web application. The IDS neither strips, sanitizes nor filters any malicious input, it simply recognizes when an attacker tries to break your site and reacts in exactly the way you want it to. Based on a set of approved and heavily tested filter rules any attack is given a numerical impact rating which makes it easy to decide what kind of action should follow the hacking attempt.

They look at the installation of the tool, an example configuration (that sets up some logging and caching settings) and a PHP script to enable the functionality. Then you can use the auto_prepend Apache directive to load it on each page and protect your site quickly and easily.

Mike Bernat is a big fan of XDebug and has posted about why he thinks installing it is the best decision you'll ever make.

I finally got around to installing Xdebug on my development environment and have decided it is the best thing since sliced bread. Installation was a breeze and the information it provides when something has gone wrong is incredibly helpful during debugging.

He explains what the software does, how it can help you and your development - even how to get it up and running on your PHP install (seriously, it's drop dead easy...why haven't you installed it yet?). He also points to the tutorial on the Zend Developer Zone introducing the powerful tool.

On the Ibuildings blog, Ian Barber has a reminder to PHP developers out there used to their servers "just working" because of the popularity of LAMP. He recommends digging a little deeper to the "behind the scenes" of how the server is configured.

PHP programmers generally know what a good systems architecture should look like, but it is often a reality of development that they will have little input on the system itself until the last minute. In fact, it's far from uncommon for a developer to be faced with an off-the-shelf dedicated LAMP server, and left up to their own devices.

He recommends getting to know things like the package manager for your distribution (apt, yum, yast, etc), stripping down the modules your installation is using, check that all of the packages in use need to be enabled and ensure that the network connection is set up correctly and is what you need for the site.

Jacques Marneweck points out a tutorial he came across showing how to perform an installation of the PEAR library system on a shared host.

This is quite useful when you are forced into using a clueless shared host who only have the bare PEAR installation on their servers, and have not ever considered installing DB, Mail, Net_SMTP, etc. which lots of people use instead of reinventing the wheel with each project.

The steps of the tutorial are pretty simple and they include two different ways - installing it to your docroot directory if the web host already has the pear binary set up or using ftp/ftps/sftp to upload and install the needed files.

Gennady Feldman has posted the second part of his install instructions for setting up the Oracle Instant Client (11g) and the Oracle OCI8 drivers in PHP.

This is part 2 of my installation instructions. This is my attempt to provide an updated and simplified reference. I am leaving Part 1 as is, because that part can also be useful.

This updated tutorial shows the steps to installing 11g (versus 10g in the previous example) including the packages you'll need, the commands to make it work and a PEAR version of the install if you choose to go that route.

On her blog today Nessa has written up a tutorial on getting SuPHP working along with cPanel on your system.

I wrote this tutorial a while back and figured it would be good to post because suPHP is growing more popular as an alternative to phpSuExec. The instructions assume that you are on a Linux cPanel server and are familiar with how to install PHP, but do not want to use EasyApache's suPHP installer in WHM.

It's a long process but a lot of it is just configuration changes and grabbing the right software. Every line of each of the config files you'll need to change is there ready to cut and paste into your files as well as the command line calls you'll need to make to configure/compile and move files to where they need to go.

In a new blog post Tony Bibbs talks about an issue that he's been having (an "oh so familiar problem") when trying to install the Zend Studio Neon IDE - the same as last time, an issue with a locked resource.

The fix this time was a bit more cumbersome because the unpacking of files happens during the install not when you explicitly uncompress the tarball. However the Internet proved to be a valuable resource again as I found the fix from a blog by someone overseas.

The solution involved breaking the installer (pushing it to the background for a bit) at a certain point, executing a command to replace the variable name and resuming the install process to complete a correct software installation.

On the HowToForge website, there's a new step-by-step tutorial on getting a complete setup of Linux, EngineX, MySQL and PHP on a Ubuntu/Debian box working.

This HowTo will describe the setup of an efficient http server and mail server for small or medium configurations (as low as 96 mb). So this config is ideal for a small VPS. You can find a good choice of cheap and performant VPS (XEN) at x|encon, a german hosting company. they provide many scalable VPS solutions with pre-installed Debian and Ubuntu disc images.

They have it broken out into five overarching steps for getting things working, but there's lots of little sub-steps you'll need to work through to get it up and running. Thankfully, most of the hard part (installing the packages) is handled through the apt-get command and you won't be required to compile.