About a week ago, I was doing some upgrades on my development machine and came across a rather nasty issue when it comes to how .php(s) files are associated with PHP in Apache. It seems that a number of distros including Gentoo (which is what I was using) are using the [same] configuration directive to make the PHP module parse PHP files

The problem comes from their use of "AddHandler" versus "AddType" when telling Apache which files to parse as PHP. The first allows anything with ".php" in its filename to be parsed while the second limits it to just files ending in ".php". Check your configuration to ensure you're not open to this issue, especially if there's scripts/files outside of your control.

XML and XSLT technologies provides standard ways of separation of presentation and data. This article contains an example of simple php "xslt engine" for XML driven web-sites which implements caching techniques and Apache-based XML file processing.

They start by setting up the web server to parse all XML file requests through a handler script using Apache's directives. Following thi ssetup, there's three code blocks, one for each of the "moving parts" of the sample application - the XML content, the XSLT template to style it, and the PHP to bring them both together.