In this new post to his blog Rob Allen looks at how to use a standard installation of the Zend Framework on a shared hosting environment.

When you deploy a Zend Framework website to a shared host, you usually cannot change the DocumentRoot to point at the public/ folder of the website. As a result the URL to the website is now http://www.example.com/public/. This doesn't look very professional, so we'd like to remove it. The easiest way, given a ZF project created using Zend_Tool.

In the index.php file you'll need to define a constant and an .htaccess file to route everything back to that index. You'll need to be aware of this change when working with files and can check in the front controller for that constant to reset the base path if needed (code example included).

On the Zend Developer Zone a new tutorial has been posted showing how to compile PHP extensions to work with the Zend Server web platform.

To date, Zend Server includes 77 PHP extensions that Zend considers essential or just very helpful for most PHP developers. Still, what if the one that your code uses is not among them? Or you wish to compile one of the extensions Zend Server is shipped with in a different way (against your own libraries or to support additional, less common features)? If this scenario sounds familiar to you, you may find this tutorial useful.

You'll need to know a bit about compiling and some of the tools (like autoconf, automake, the gcc compiler, and libtool) before you get started. Two scenarios are described - one for installing and compiling the Newt extension (RedHat's Newt New Terminal library) and another slightly less automated for the Pspell extension.

Each of these examples make a shared module that can be included into the PHP installation via your php.ini.

On the Zend Developer Zone a new tutorial has been posted looking at taking your pre-existing C++ functionality and wrapping it in a PHP extension to be used directly in your code.

In this tutorial I am going to walk you through creating a PHP extension called "vehicles" which will expose a single class called "Car" (obviously in the real-world, your extensions will expose many classes, but I'm trying to keep things simple). The extension will be built for PHP 5. I am only going to give instructions for building the extension in a UNIX-like environment, although most of what I cover should apply to Windows extension development as well.

The tutorial walks you through everything - how the file layout should look, making a build system, the contents of his files (the sample extension lets you do things to the Car like shift gears and brake) and how to combine the C++ code with the build process to create a shared module you can include right in your php.ini.

The Zend Developer Zone has pointed out a recent blog post from Mauricio Cuenca showing how to run two (or more) Zend Framework applications on one account on a shared hosting environment.

Shared hosting environments can be a nightmare when it comes to PHP Web Development, specially in testing stages. Yes, I know one should not be using and paying for a hosting plan if the code is still not production ready, but I have seen some cases. I will try to show how to have the Zend Framework installed with as many projects as you want (if your server quota allows you to) in the same web space and all these projects sharing the same ZF copy.

He includes his basic directory structure - separate directories for each of the projects - and the boostrap code to keep the requests for that application inside of the correct directory (setting the LIBRARY_PATH, APP_PATH and CONTROLLERS_PATH).

Just for those PHP & Oracle users out there Chris Jones has posted a new entry to his Oracle blog detailing the different ways you can compile with oci8 support.

PHP OCI8 can be built using libraries from a full Oracle Database (or Database "Client") install, created from running the GUI installer. This is often referred to as an "ORACLE_HOME" install, since an environment variable of that name is set to the installed Oracle software directory. [...] Another dimension to the install is that PHP extensions can be statically compiled into the PHP executable(s), or built as shared binaries. If OCI8 is built as a shared library it is loaded into PHP as a result of setting the php.ini option "extension=oci8.so".

There's eight different methods he mentions including building it as a shared module, using the normal Oracle libraries to build and using the Instant Client libraries to run the build.

Juozas Kaziukenas has a new post to his blog today looking at using Phing to keep files in sync on a shared hosting, FTP only kind of environment.

Today I was trying to use [Phing] in shared hosting server, but as you will see, Phing can't do a lot of it's functionality without direct access to server (over shh for example). [...] Things get worse, when you try to sync files in shared hosting environment, where only FTP is available. [...] Code in the hole some months ago posted solution which uses Net_FTP (FTP functionality wrapper) package to upload files to server. I decided to try given solution, so I modified it to download source code from SVN first and then upload them.

His Phing configuration sets up the application, defining the source directory, the files to push, the FTP connection to make and pushes the files over out of an svn export. He has a slightly different solution (no code/config for this one) that would grab the last revision value from the remote server and only push out the files have have changed since then.

Lorenzo Alberton has a quick tip for those dealing with Zend Framework applications and shared hosting:

The public directory contains all the files that should be directly accessible via the web server, so you must set your web server's document root to this directory. The problem is, in most shared hosting setups you can't change the document root. [...] To solve this problem without changing the above directory structure, you can remove the .htaccess file from the public directory, and place this one in the root directory instead.

His new .htaccess file makes use of the mod_rewrite Apache extension to force everything back into the bootstrap file for your application. You can find out more about setting up a Zend Framework application in their QuickStart guide.

In a new blog post Cal Evans shares a solution he's come up with to help simplify his PHP development - using the Sun VirtualBox software to create a self-contained, controlled environment to run his scripts.

The more I thought about it though, the more I realized there had to be a better way. My current setup doesn't allow me to do things like test PHP 5.3 without setting up a whole new server just for that purpose, or maintain an environment like my production server.

He was looking for something that would work on a laptop, allow for easy environment switching and let him work on multiple projects at once. He came across the VirtualBox software and adapted it to his own needs (including shares folders between instances and multiple instances running Ubuntu) on his local machine.

In a new post today Stuart Herbert asks the question "is it possible to secure a shared server with PHP and FastCGI installed on it?" His answer follows...

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. [...] Before we can look at performance, the first question is: how exactly do we get PHP and FastCGI running as different users on the one web server in the first place?

He follows through on this, giving a little mini-tutorial on getting the environment installed on an Apache web server. He includes some benchmarks on the difference between using the Apache 1.3.x series and Apache 2 (generated using the ab benchmarking tool).

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.