Edin Kadribasic shares some great news on his blog this morning those using the PHP Windows builds will be happy to hear.

During my time at Emini I was using an old beat up machine to build PHP snapshots for Windows. It was only a Pentium II 400MHz and compiling a PHP snapshot on that machine took more than an hour. After leaving Emini I needed to find a new box for compiling PHP snapshots and PECL extensions for the Windows platform.

The light at the end of the tunnel came when Wez Furlong reminded him about a box OmniTI had that could handle just that. Now, what used to take over an hour to run takes around six minutes (a full compile of the latest snapshot with all of the extensions, including checkout and upload of the Win32 snapshot).

Some unfortunate news from Edin Kadribasic to be felt particularly by the Windows PHP users out there - the box that hosts the PECL packages for Windows has suffered a bit from a power failure.

The power failures are very rare in Denmark, but nonetheless this one managed to take out the build box. The website itself is not affected, but there are no updates for the time being.

The PECL4WIN project hosts a repository of PECL extensions precompiled for the Windows platform. The packaging and distribution system used by PECL is shared with its sister, PEAR.

UPDATE (11.15.2006) - The box is back up and working at 100% again (faulty memory was to blame). A new build has already been created.

Via this post from Christopher Jones we learn about Kian Hui Teo's blog post talking about making the switch between the normal PHP 5.1.x installation and the Zend Core for Oracle.

This situation arises as I had installed Zend Core for Oracle (ZCO), and I wanted to try out some PDO functions. As ZCO comes with PHP 5.0.5, I was stuck, and PDO is only included from PHP 5.1.x onwards, I had to install PHP 5.1.x on my Windows box so that I can play with PDO. The assumption is that we have ZCO installed and working with a Apache2 server. I share the steps here on how to install another version of PHP so that it will co-exist peacefully with ZCO.

The post outlines a process to allow both the Zend Core and a normal installation of PHP 5.1.x to live peacefully (and still be able to switch from one to the other at any time). It's actually a relatively simple ten-step process to follow, especially if you've had much experience with installing PHP from scratch. When complete, you can start up one or the other, making it easy to test scripts in both or to just use the functionality in one (as he needed with PDO).