From Iain Dooley on WorkingSoftware.com.au today, there's a new tutorial covering the installation of PHP4 and PHP5 onto a FreeBSD server.

So, briefly here is my little recipe for getting PHP4 and PHP5 to run concurrently on FreeBSD using Apache 2.2 and mod_proxy.

He points out one method that's been posted to get this all working, but notes that there are a few issues he found with it. That's the point of this post - to rectify and solve those problems to have you on your way to a happily working PHP4/PHP5 installation.

His guide is broken up into the key steps:

• Compiling with mod_proxy from FreeBSD ports
• Installing another Apache instance
• PHP Installation
• Configuring and running Apache
• and a bug, Bug 37770, he came across where the proxy would just stop working

The Zend Developer Zone has a new tutorial posted today on the topic of installing both PHP4 and PHP5 at the same time (well, have them installed at the same time) on one Windows XP machine. The kicker is that it only uses one Apache 2 installation and runs on a single port. Interested?

One thing is sure, the fifth version of this great programming language is much better than all the previous ones, and sooner or later it will become ubiquitous. But what to do until then? Is it possible to have the 'best of both worlds'?

Is it possible to have the both versions of PHP installed on the same computer without conflicts, so one can maintain old PHP 4 projects, and develop new PHP 5 code? The answer is, yes.

The author (Slobodan Pavkov) steps you through his solution:

• how to prepare the machine for the installation and what you need to download
• how to get things installed and configured
• and a simple test to make sure things are in order

The key to the seperation is editing the hosts file on the machine and placing the files in different directories - one for PHP5 files and another for PHP4.