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.