Stuart Herbert has a new post today showing how to get the well-established PEAR package management system working on Windows 7 so you can easily call "pear install" on whatever your needs might be.

So that I don’t forget how to do this next time around. Worked for me, your mileage may vary. First step is to get a working install of PHP. [...] At this point, you should be able to open up a Command Prompt, and type ‘php -v’, and see the response ‘PHP v5.4.latest …’ appear as expected. Now for PEAR itself.

He gives step-by-step instructions on how to get PEAR up and running - downloading and configuring it with the correct Windows-based paths and using the PEAR_ENV.reg file to update your registry.

On DZone.com there's a new post linking to a screencast from Jon Adams about using Lithium, MongoDB and PHP 5.3.1 in IIS (Windows 7).

A screencast demonstrating how to quickly get up and running with PHP 5.3.1 and MongoDB on Windows 7 and IIS 7 and getting started with Lithium, the most RAD framework for PHP 5.3+.

The actual screencast is about a year old, but the topic is interesting enough to bring back up. Lithium has been called the "framework for people who hate frameworks" and focuses on using standardized design patterns in an aspect oriented environment when possible.

Amit Singh has a recent post to his blog with step-by-step instructions on how to get PEAR, PHPUnit and a WAMP installed and working on Windows 7.

In the project that i am currently working on, we decided to use PHPUnit for doing our unit testing, and i found that it was not a straight forward thing to install that I had thought it would be. I had to start by installing Pear, and as soon as i type 'go-pear' in command prompt and pressed enter key I got my first error. So here are the steps needed to install PEAR and PHPUnit error free on WAMP.

Since the steps to install the WAMP server are pretty easy, he focuses on the other two technologies. He breaks up the install into the steps for PEAR and then the steps for installing and configuring PHPUnit. Obviously you'll need to change some paths for your system, but it's a pretty simple process and you should be up and running in no time.

Christian Wenz has put together a guide for installing PHP on the newest Windows version - the Beta of Windows 7 recently released for download.

Microsoft have released the first public beta for their upcoming Windows 7 operating system. To me it looks surprisingly similar to Vista (which is a good thing and a bad thing), so I thought that installing PHP on it should be easy, as well. Actually, it was really easy, but since yesterday two people independently from each other asked me how to do it, I thought I'd write down the required steps.

The basic steps aren't very different from a normal Windows (IIS) installation:

• Grab the latest non-thread-safe Windows binaries of PHP
• Modify a few php.ini settings
• Run the IIS installer and turn on CGI support
• Point a FastCGI instance at PHP and
• Make a test page