After putting together an example setup of how to run multiple PHP versions all on the same machine with as little hassle as possible, Christian Weiske is back with the second half - putting those multiple versions into Apache.

After showing you how to set up multiple PHP versions on a single machine, it's time to explain how to stuff all those compiled php-cgi executables into a single Apache web server instance.

The key lies in using the mod_fastcgi module for Apache rather than the usual mod_php one. Each PHP version gets its own CGI server and the versions are changed based on the virtual host names.

Kae Verens has come up with a tutorial using a feature of HTML5 - multiple file uploads.

As a response to a reported bug where Chrome was taking ages to load up a flash multiple-file uploader, I've updated KFM to use HTML5's multiple-file input box where possible.

The code examples in the post show how to use a square bracket ("[]") set in the name of a file upload field, how they're handled on the PHP side and how they can be accessed in the FILES superglobal.

Ruslan Yakushev has written up a new post detailing how you can set up an IIS server (traditionally only able to handle one PHP version instance at a time) to use multiple versions depending on your needs.

This post describes how to configure IIS to support multiple versions of PHP on the same server. This kind of setup is useful in development environments where it is necessary to test an application with different PHP versions. Also, it is often used in production environments, where many PHP applications are hosted on the same server and some of them have dependency on a particular PHP version.

He gives instructions for three IIS versions - 5.1, 6.0 and 7.0 and later. The trick to it is in the FastCGI configuration file. His technique lets you set up alias to the different PHP installations (as many as you want) and a "Types" section where it can easily be swapped out. With IIS 7.0 and later, some of this can be done through the IIS control panel.

On the Millwood Online blog there's a quick step-by-step about getting multiple Drupal sites up and running on one code installation.

One of the great things about Drupal is that you can run more that one site off one installation. This saves disk space and load on your server, it also saves maintenance time. With only one installation to manage and update the time spent administering your site drops greatly.

The process is pretty simple - install Drupal normally and set it up for the main domain, then change the directory name for the settings and add another for the new domain name. Go update your Apache virtual host configuration file to point to the new location and restart the web server. Both of your domains should be set and ready.

In a new post today Mark van der Velden looks at how to run more than one PHP version on one web server.

This is a blog about running two PHP versions on one webserver and using multiple php.ini files, this combination can be a tricky one to tackle. But luckily one we can tackle quite easily as long as one of the PHP versions is >= 5.2.7. For this example I'll be using Apache, but the webserver flavor doesn't really matter. The most important part is the "PHP_INI_SCAN_DIR" environment variable.

He wanted to be able to run a specific version (or versions) on the web server for applications that depended on or required a certain PHP version - like one that was written in PHP4 that would have all sorts of quirks if moved to PHP5. You'll need to know a bit about installing packages and how to compile one of the versions yourself, but configuring the Apache httpd.conf is simple. Virtual hosts make it easy to define a specific version for different parts of the site.

Vid Luther has a new post today looking at connecting to multiple databases inside of your Symfony framework application. The key is in setting up your YAML files the right way.

Since you need a schema.yml or xml file, you can either generate one using a tool that will take your data defintion and create the YAML for you, or you can cheat and build a temp project, configure it to work with earlyprototype , and then do a symfony propel:build-schema . This will give you a schema.yml file in your config directory.

He walks you through the creation of two simple YAML files with database connection information and how to drop their contents over into the main database.yml file and some code to run the queries on the different databases.

On the Ask About PHP blog there's a quick tutorial looking at a setup to use the CodeIgniter framework to power multiple websites (in subdomains).

CI's default folder structure is really geared towards one site domain, and having both the application folder and the system folder visible to the browser is not exactly a secure approach. By configuring your install to support multiple sites, not only do you make the updating of the CI core easier, but also make the CI install more secure as a whole.

The example is on a Windows system, but the instructions are generic enough to work on any platform. They're using it under a XAMPP install, but the changes are all below the document root of that setup. You'll need to edit some of the config files and be able to update the Apache configuration to work with VirtualHosts

In this new post to his blog Brandon Savage takes a look at multiple inheritance in PHP applications - specifically where it could "kill you" if you're not careful.

This is a fantastic way to further encapsulate and abstract your code because it means you can define some base functionality and then later on extend that class to add new functionality and even override existing functionality to make the class specific. But this concept is a double-edged sword in PHP (and all other languages).

The problem lies in methods in classes that could be overriding parents and the sort of results that instance of might return in a multiple inheritance environment. He includes code snippets both illustrating the problem and showing a suggestion for how it could be avoided.

For most developers, working with XDebug is a simple matter of setting up the extension and getting to work. For larger teams, though, its not quite that easy. The way that XDebug is set up by default, it's no quite conducive to multiuser situations. Derick Rethans is here to help in his latest blog post, though. He describes a method (using a DBGp proxy) to handle splitting things between multiple developers.

As author of Xdebug, people ask me often the question how to handle the case in teams when there is one development server and multiple developers working on the same project on that server. [...] Now, in order to solve the above mentioned issue, you will need to run a DBGp proxy. DBGp is the protocol, designed by ActiveState and myself to facilitate communication between an IDE and PHP+Xdebug.

He walks you through the setup process - how to point XDebug to the correct location and how to configure the proxy to handle the multiple incoming requests and route the debug information back to the correct client.

Jani Hartikainen has written up a new post for his blog looking at how to combine multiple password validation methods inside of a single application.

If your application is well thought out, you would not want to save any data that isn't valid. So what do you do, when you need different validation schemes, say for passwords, depending on some special case? [...] There is a better approach: Using a "policy" - Policies can be used for other things than this too, but let's look at how to use a policy for managing password validation.

He sets up an example scenario where the user sets an invalid and valid password and shows how policies for password validation (regular expression matches and other validation techniques) can provide a simple way to ensure the user has entered the right information.