The TutsPlus.com site has posted another tutorial in their "Introduction to the Yii Framework series" showing you how to install the framework on Windows and Mac. The usual instructions walk you through installation on a unix-based system, so this helps those without access to a system like that.

In today's tutorial, we'll explain how to install Yii in a local development environment for both Windows and macOS. For the Windows guide, we'll rely on WAMP Server, a Windows web development environment for Apache, PHP and Mac, and for the Mac guide, we'll use its cousin, MAMP. Although Rod uses WAMP in today's tutorial, there is also a Windows version of MAMP.

There's a brief section at the start describing the Yii framework for those who aren't familiar with it (including what "Yii Advanced" is). Next, comes the installation instructions for Mac using MAMP including the install of the MAMP software and the configuration to change to get Yii up and running. Following this comes to Windows installation using WAMP and the configuration changes needed there. The remainder of the post shows the configuration of the Yii framework application itself and how to ensure everything is working correctly.

Michelangelo van Dam has posted a "follow up" to his previous article about setting up a PHP installation on the recent versions of Mac OSX. In this new tutorial he makes some updates for the latest OS X release: Sierra.

Apple has released the latest version of their OS X operating system to the broad public and many have already upgraded their mac devices. But as it goes with each release, Apple likes to do things a bit different making it quite challenging for PHP developers to stay current with the latest PHP version (or other versions).

This version of mac OS (11.12) comes pre-installed with PHP 5.6.24. [...] Good for Apple, but this version reaches end-of-life support by the end of this year, so it would be great if you could upgrade to PHP 7.0 or even play with the latest PHP 7.1 release candidates.

While he points out that things like XAMPP and Homebrew can be used to set the installation up, he focuses more on compiling and installing it natively. He shares an issue he had with a missing runtime and how to get it installed and working happily so the PHP compile completes without issues.

Matt Trask has put together a new post spotlighting a handy library that's widely used across the PHP ecosystem for generating UUIDs: ramsey/uuid.

Welcome to the first installment in my 2113918230981 part series, "Better know a Package!". Tonight's package: the famous/infamous Uuid package that that taught us all what Ramsey is in Scottish, Rhumsaa. Created to give PHP a library to generate Universal Unique Identifiers, this library has been a stallwort in the community. Ben Ramsey created it first under the Rhumsaa namesapce before moving it to the Ramsey namespace, saving us all from learning more Scottish then we needed to ever learn.

[...] A UUID, or Universally Unique Identifier, will generate a 128 bite unique key in different series based on the version you asked for. RFC-4122 dictates how Uuids should be generated, and recommends 4 types.

Matt then goes on to describe each of the different UUID types and provides some code examples as illustration:

• Version 1: Time and MAC addressed based Uuid
• Version 2: DCE-based
• Version 3: UUIDs based on a namespace and then it is MD5 hashed
• Version 4: Random generation (based on the output of random_bytes

He also includes examples of the UUIDs output by each method (not much difference there as the structure of the resulting UUID is all the same).

In a new post to his site Michelangelo van Dam has posted a guide to compiling PHP 7 on OSX "El Capitan", the latest release of the popular Apple operating system.

Apple has made a numerous changes to the way OS X (10.11) "El Capitain" uses open source elements like PHP and OpenSSL. Compiling PHP from source requires a bit more modifications.

This article is a follow-up on my previous post <a href='http://www.dragonbe.com/2015/12/installing-php-7-with-xdebug-apache-and.html">Installing PHP 7 with XDebug, Apache and MySQL on OS X Yosemite.

He then provides the commands and configuration information you'll need to get things up and running:

• OpenSSL
• PHP 7
• Apache

The end result is a simple PHP 7 installation with plenty of features installed.

Eric Barnes has posted a guide to helping you set up (as he sees it) a good PHP development environment on your Mac that includes Homebrew for package management, Composer, Vagrant and the Laravel Homestead VM for project hosting.

This past weekend I decided it was finally time to wipe my Macbook’s hard drive and start fresh. I have used it daily for several years now and still had artifacts from when I used Mamp. Since then Vagrant has turned to my local server of choice and one of the reasons is how clean you can keep your machine by utilizing it.

After finishing the new Mac OS X install it felt like a new beginning. So clean, so minimal. [...] This go around I wanted to keep it as minimal as possible and only install things I know I need and use. This tutorial covers how I set up my Mac for local PHP Development.

His list of software includes the previously mentioned four as well as the ZSH shell replacing the default bash and, obviously, PHP itself installed via Homebrew.

In this new post to DZone.com Andy Hawthorne explains how to install MongoDB on OSX and get a local PHP working with it.

MongoDB is a document oriented, NoSQL database. It is gathering momentum and popularity amongst developers because it is flexible, and scalable at the same time. In this article I will describe how I got it set up and working on my Mac running OS X 10.8.2 and MAMP with PHP 5.2.17, and PHP 5.3.6.

They go a bit simpler route than trying to compile it yourself by using the binaries direct from the source. Instructions are included to test the installation, insert a record and how to install the MongoDB PHP driver for a MAMP installation. It's a shared object, though, so it's not specific to MAMP and could be installed even on the local OSX PHP functionality.

Ralph Schindler has a new post to his blog today detailing the process you'll need to compile Gearman (or just about anything) on a Zend Server CE install on Snow Leopard.

Zend Server CE for Mac (as of this writing), comes compiled as an i386 executable only. This includes the PHP binary, php library, and apache binaries that come shipped with ZSCE. While ZSCE works great out the box with all the provided extensions, you might find that you want some additional 3rd party PHP extensions compiled/linked into this stack. That's where things get a little confusing, and in this post, we’ll look at how to install the gearman extension.

He give two methods - the easy way where you can export a CFLAGS setting to compile with multiple architectures or the harder way (that works for Gearman), building static libraries. The full list of commands (and some example output) is included in the post. In the comments there's also an example of the install if you're using Macports.

Fabien Potencier has been moving over to the Mac OSX platform for some of his development and figured out that he needed a custom installation of PHP 5.3, different than the one that comes with the default install of Snow Leopard. The process was a bit tricky, so he's written up a post as a guide for those wanting to do it too.

To do my work, I need to have several different versions of PHP at hand, with different configurations, and so I always compile my own PHP and Apache binaries on my Mac. [...] Now that I use PHP 5.3.0 more and more, I decided it was time to compile my own version. As it turns out, compiling PHP 5.3.0 on Snow Leopard is a bit involving.

He walks you through the configure command he used, how he patched the iconv.c file, patch the source of PHP with the change and recompile with an EXTRA_LIBs environment variable set. The steps he followed were based on the hints provided in this bug from the PHP.net website.

On the Nefarious Designs blog today, there's a new post stepping you through every step you'll need (yes, every single one) to get multiple virtual development environments set up with Apache, PHP, MySQL, Python, Django, CouchDB and Twisted.

Since I’ve started doing all of my development on virtual machines, I began thinking about my development workflow: In theory, I should be able to model the perfect server environment virtually. I wasn’t sure what environment I wanted to end up with, but I had a good idea what basic virtual machines I wanted as a starting layout.

He sets up three different environments - development, staging a production - all with the same packages and all built on a base Ubuntu virtual machine. By cloning your customized version, you can built out as many instances as you'd like and tweak each for their intent.

If you've been shopping around for a new IDE to use in your development, you might want to check out this new article from NETTUTS.com showing eighteen popular IDEs for several different platforms (Win/Mac/Linux).

Last week we looked at 22 Neat Editors for Windows. But sometimes, a code editor simply isn't enough, especially when you're working with things like databases and classes. Which IDE will you prefer? Hopefully you'll find it below!

IDEs that made the list include:

• Visual Web Developer
• PHPEdit
• Expression Web
• Coda
• Eclipse
• Aptana Studio