On the Zend Developer Zone there's a new article that looks to answer the question in its title - "Why should I care what server my application is running on?" (by Eddo Rotman)

Imagine this - you develop an application on your machine and then, when you come to deploy it to the production server, all of a sudden, you encounter various errors and failures. Or maybe, when you decide to switch your hosting provider, your application stops behaving the way it should. How about this -... one day, out of the blue (well, out of your IT manager's whim) your application just misbehaves. Sounds familiar?

Times like can never be completely avoided (yes, there'll always be bugs) but you can take some steps to help prevent most of the major failing points. He points out some of the key configuration directives to watch out for, differences in some functions' responses based on the OS, and the differences in character sets between a unix-based and Windows based environment (like rn versus just n).

Congrats to Brian DeShong for having his submissions from this year's TestFest be included in the next release of PHP, version 5.3's build.

Someday I'll look back on this post and think it's super lame, but my recent submission of two tests for PHP's putenv() function made it into PHP_5_3! I've officially made a contribution it's a red letter day, folks. Without Atlanta PHP and PHP's Testfest, none of this would have been possible.

His tests ran with putenv() and the safe_mode_allowed_env_vars/safe_mode_protected_env_vars settings in use. You can see the inclusion in this commit message (by Lars Strojny).

The Developer Tutorials blog has posted this new guide on how to install one of the more popular PHP content management systems out there - Drupal.

One of the most popular CMSs is Drupal, partly because it offers all of the aforesaid features, and partly because developers familiar with PHP (the language used by Drupal) can modify the functioning and appearance of almost every aspect of Drupal.

In this tutorial, we will discuss how to install and configure a brand-new Drupal Web site from scratch. We will also touch upon the basics of adding content to a Drupal installation.

They include useful screenshots along the way as well, helping to guide you through the process a bit better than with just words. There's tons of configuration options that you could mess with in a Drupal installation, but they do well to give you the essential ones that you'll need to get it up and running smoothly.

On the Developer Tutorials blog today, Akash Mehta has posted the second part of his look at the "ultimate web development environment", a continuation from this previous part.

Today I'm going to look at a local development server and its PHP configuration, as well as some of the IDEs/editors available for Linux, especially the cross-platform options.

Tools mentioned this time include things like a local development server (invaluable) some PHP configuration tips and the editors they mentioned, things like Aptana, Eclipse and Zend Studio.

Ian Selby, working for a startup and building a lot of code up from scratch came across a problem - the upload of pretty large files via PHP:

I have found myself in a position where I am writing scripts that may need to upload fairly large files. My scripts were timing out, and I couldn't seem to figure out why. For the unitiated, there are some standard things that you usually do to both your php.ini and in your script in this situation [...] However, it turns out there are some other php.ini config variables that you may need to look at.

The "usual suspects" list includes changing the max_upload_size value and adjusting the script timeout. The other settings he mentions, though, are things like memory_limit, post_max_size and max_input_time to help increase the default times that PHP uses on most page executions.

As mentioned by the International PHP Magazine, Maksymilian Arciemowicz has posted about some testing he's been doing on the newly released PHP 5.2.4 and has still found some issues with it.

In 30 August PHP Team have released new version PHP with number 5.2.4. We have tested this version and now we can say, that not all issues from PHP 5.2.3 are patched. It is possible bypass safe_mode, open_basedir and disabled_functions.

The issue he describes is the lack of a "mail.force_extra_parameters" setting in the php.ini still making it possible to exploit the mail() function to execute arbitrary PHP code.

Pierre-Alain Joye has posted a quick hit to his blog today about using one php.ini file for both a cli and cgi installation of PHP without it throwing errors for htscanner.

Htscanner reports error during module or request init (returns FAILURE), these errors may be fatal and stop the current executions. This behavior is not desired if you use it in a shell ((if you have only one system php.ini for both cli and cgi or if htscanner is compiled statically). This release brings a new ini settings to solve this problem, stop_on_error.

The solution involves changing the htscanner setting to 0 instead of 1 to return a "SUCCESS" message rather than the errors.

In this new entry on his blog, Alexander Netkachev shares a hint for those PHP IDE Eclipse users out there frustrated with php.ini issues.

You may notice that the IDE does not load options specified in the php.ini and this makes customizing extensions impossible. I run into this problem today and looked over the source code of PHP plugin for it.

The solution he found was in an update he found to one of the Java files, pointing it to the correct location. Changing this changes the default setting for the editor.

In an effort to get some thought going about ways to encourage security in PHP applications, Stas has posted an idea about a simplified php.ini setting - production=On.

His idea is that, with this setting on, the PHP installation would:

• disable display errors
• disable phpinfo()
• turn expose_php off
• make max_execution_time/memory_limit reasonable
• and possibly a few others that some developers forget to set correctly

Pierre-Alain Joye has an update on one of the PECL packages he maintains, htscanner, on his blog today:

htscanner 0.6.0 has been released. It caches the ini settings instead of looking for htaccess files in the current directory and its parents. The performance impact is yet minimal.

A new ini setting was also added, htscanner.default_ttl, to give the lifetime of the cache. You can get this latest version of htscanner from its PECL homepage.