John Mertic passed along a note about a new post to the SugarCRM developers blog detailing how to enable IMAP support for PHP on an OS X machine.

With the release of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard last fall, Apple (finally) included a modern version of PHP (currently version 5.2.6 as of this writing). [...] However, the default install of PHP that Apple included didn't include all of the available PHP extensions. Most notable is the IMAP extension, which is used in SugarCRM for the Campaigns and Emails modules. However you can build this extension and have it loaded dynamically, without affecting the rest of the default PHP install.

He shows where to get the packages and libraries you'll need to get the support working. The method involves building a shared module and including it to be loaded in your php.ini. This way it doesn't disrupt anything the current build has and you don't have to recompile everything over again.

Doug Brown has posted a new entry to his blog about how the Zend_Cache component of the Zend Framework has saved him some money.

He and his site were taken offline by his own hosting company because of one little detail - the limit on usage for the shared server was 3% and his site was using 30%. Going through his logs, he found the culprit - a "too many connections" message from MySQL due to the number of requests.

I'll admit, I was in a huge hurry to get this project done, so I wasn't thinking about the long term effects. Needless to say, I wasn't caching my MySQL query results. I know, tisk tisk.

He added a new private method to his class (using Zend_Cache to store the date) and dropped the call into his controller to pulled the cached info whenever it needed it.

Jacques Marneweck points out a tutorial he came across showing how to perform an installation of the PEAR library system on a shared host.

This is quite useful when you are forced into using a clueless shared host who only have the bare PEAR installation on their servers, and have not ever considered installing DB, Mail, Net_SMTP, etc. which lots of people use instead of reinventing the wheel with each project.

The steps of the tutorial are pretty simple and they include two different ways - installing it to your docroot directory if the web host already has the pear binary set up or using ftp/ftps/sftp to upload and install the needed files.

Hasin Hayder has provided some instructions he's created to install the Imagick extension for PHP on a Ubuntu linux system (7.10) in a new blog entry.

I already have ImageMagick installed in my machine and I tried to install the Imagick extension for PHP but I was stuck with strange errors. I have spent couple of hours today to figure out what I did wrong and Why I cant build that extension. Finally I've figured out that I must install ImageMagick from source first to build that extension. Heres how to.

He walks through the install, talking about where to get the package from, where to get the PECL extension for PHP and the compile process (with the result of a .so file PHP's extension can use).

Stuart Herbert has posted about a very helpful method server admins can use out there to not only help secure their server but possibly make their web hosting users more happy in the long run - using suphp on a shared server (security).

The challenge with securing a shared hosting server is how to secure the website from attack both from the outside and from the inside. [...] This has created a gap that a number of third-party solutions have attempted to fill. One of the oldest of these is suphp, created by Sebastian Marsching.

He works through the whole process - the installation (this is all on a Gentoo linux system), configuring for your Apache install, changing Apache to make it work with suphp and finally some benchmarks and parting comments concerning its use.

From the DeveloperTutorials.com website today there's a new walk-through showing you how to get PHP5 installed with Apache and MySQL onto a linux machine of your choosing. They chose to go with SuSE, but it should work on just about anything else.

We will set up PHP as a shared module, being loaded into Apache2 dynamically during the server startup. These instructions are known to work for PHP versions: 5.0.4 through 5.2.1.

They list a few prerequisites (the obvious ones) and where to grab the source for PHP. The rest is broken up into a few simple (hopefully) steps for the unpacking, compiling, configuring and integration with Apache.

One of the more frustrating things about working on a shared server is trying to keep it secure while still giving users some flexibility in their environments. Stuart Herbert has continued his series looking at combating issues like this with this look at installing suexec to secure a shared server.

The challenge with securing a shared hosting server is how to secure the website from attack both from the outside and from the inside. PHP has built-in features to help, but ultimately it's the wrong place to address the problem.

His guide steps through the entire process - getting the software, configuring Apache (with the PHP/CGI installation) and configuring suexec, both for the default install and then for the shared server settings. There's even a few brief benchmarks showing the speed of execution for scripts with and without the suexec environment.

Following up on a previous article, Stuart Herbert has posted some of the things that PHP can do to help solve the previously mentioned shared hosting problems.

The challenge is to secure the box not just from outside attack (something you have to do anyway, and which I'll cover later in this series), but also to make sure that code running on one website can't steal confidential data like MySQL passwords from any of the other websites.

It's not just a problem that PHP has, but it does, thankfully, have several settings and things that you can do to help. Among those on the list are things like: safe_mode, open_basedir and how PHP 6 will effect both of these. He's included settings for both of them to get you started.

Tony Bibbs comments today about some issues that he's been having with his installation of Zend's Studio IDE ever since he made the update to a more recent version of SUSE - version 10.3.

Well, upgrading from openSUSE 10.2 to 10.3 has been a bit brutal. [...] So this morning I got to work and had a customer demo and felt I needed to have the Zend Studio IDE working to be able to make some quick changes on the fly and it would work.

His problem was with an assertion issue - the resource the software was trying to access was locked. He did find a solution, though on Chris Hope's blog involving a sudoed call to sed to replace a value in one of the shared libraries for Zend Studio, replacing one variable name with another.

Cal Evans over on the Zend Developer Zone has another of his infamous (well, okay - not infamous, but definitely good) interviews with people all around the PHP community. This time, it's a chat with Ed Finkler, a developer over at CERIAS concerning the new security tool designed to help even the security-clueless to protect themselves and their system.

Intrigued as much by this project, as I was by the fact that Ed wrote me and told me it was time for me to interview him, I called Ed and we talked about the project.

They talk about where the idea for the tool came from, one of the targets for the use of the project (those on shared hosting), and the mention that it is modular in design and they are more than happy to have developers work up tests to be sure things are working 100% correctly.