Ruslan Yakushev has a recent post about installing the PEAR tools and installing an example package, phploc.

PEAR (short for PHP Extension and Application Repository) is a framework and distribution system for reusable PHP components. In includes many useful tools and components that can be easily downloaded and installed by using PEAR package manager. This post describes how to install and configure PEAR package manager and then how to use it to install a PEAR package. An example PEAR package used in this post is phploc, which is a tool for measuring the size of PHP projects.

He recommends installing PHP via the Web Platform Installer and use the PHP 5.3 VC9 non-thread-safe package with the PHP Manager. All of the commands needed are included as well as some of the sample output that results. Once you get PEAR installed, then they show how to discover the PEAR channel and "pear install" the right packages for phploc (including the dependencies it might need).

Josh Holmes, just coming off of presenting at OpenCa.mp in Dallas, has posted his entire presentation to his blog for anyone that missed it and wants to catch up. He spoke about scaling WordPress on the Windows platform. He also includes a lot of content in the post that he wasn't able to get to during the presentation.

Now, on to my session itself. This was a fun session. I only had 30 minutes and I had about 3 hours of material so I've got a ton of stuff in these notes that I didn't cover in the session itself. The session is a take off a session that I did at MODxpo back in the spring. The talk itself is about 3-5 minutes of slides and the rest is all demos.

If you're looking for the actual slides, they're over on slideshare, but the real content - including the demos (and screenshots of them) are included. He talks about the Windows Platform Installer, the WinCache library and Windows Azure Data Storage.

On his blog today Brian Swan talks about the Azure command line tools for PHP that are now a part of the Windows Platform Installer (WebPI).

The Windows Azure Command Line Tools for PHP are now available in the Microsoft Web Platform Installer (Web PI). This announcement was made on the Interoperability Team blog as part of a post that outlines interoperability elements of a cloud platform. The entire post deserves a close read, but I’m initially most excited about this small piece of the announcement.

This small piece talks about this latest tool release that can be installed directly from the WebPI installer under the Developer Tools section of the interface. You'll still need the Azure SDK to use the tools, but if you don't have it the WebPI installer will download and set it up for you. You can find more info about them here.

In a new post to his blog Klaus Graefensteiner talks about one of the fastest ways to get WordPress installed and running on a Windows 7 platform - the Web Platform Installer.

his is the first installment of a series of blog post called the WIMPinator Chronicles that describe how to setup a PHP development environment for Windows 7 and IIS 7.5. In this part we are taking advantage of a very cool tool called the Web Platform Installer. With a few clicks you will be able to install and configure IIS7, PHP, MySQL and a Wordpress blog on your local Windows 7 computer.

With the Web Platform Installer, the installation of the needed software is just a few clicks (and configuration settings) away. Windows users will feel right at home. His screenshots guide you through the whole process and you'll end up with IIS, PHP and MySQL installed to run the WordPress blogging platform on your local machine.

On the Server-Side Essentials blog for SitePoint.com today Akash Mehta has a new tutorial walking you through the beginning steps of using SQL Server Express and PHP with the help of the Windows Platform Installer.

This article assumes you have a basic understanding of PHP and relational databases - if you can write PHP and SQL code to manipulate database records, you’re good to go. We’ll move through the PHP fairly quickly, in order to focus on the power and simplicity of the platform.

You'll need to download the Web Platform Installer to follow along with the tutorial (or, obviously, have all of the needed software installed already). He walks you through the installation complete with screenshots including how to create the handler to let your PHP connect to the SQL Server backend and making some sample tables for PHP to select data from.

Brian Swan has posted a new guide to his blog today to help you get started with PHP on Windows the easy way - with the help of the Windows Platform Installer (and it's compared to a manual install too).

I started working on some of the posts that I've promised, but I quickly realized I should cover the basics first. So, in this post I’ll cover the requirements, options, and instructions for installing PHP and configuring Internet Information Services (IIS). [...] I suggest reading through the entire post before starting to install PHP. I will cover how to use the Web Platform Installer (WPI) and how to install PHP manually.

The guide for the Web Platform Installer is really just a series of screenshots showing the menus and the options you'll need to check to get a complete install up and running including the WinCache tool and SQL Server connectivity. The details on the manual installation aren't as detailed since there's so many options that could be set up with IIS and PHP. They rely mostly on the instructions PHP.net provides to get it working on Windows with either Apache or IIS.

On the IIS.net site today (in the Web Platform Installer section) a new walk-through has been published on their latest release of the Web Platform Installer (version 2.0).

The Microsoft Web Platform Installer (Web PI) is a free tool that makes it simple to download and install the latest components of the Microsoft Web Platform, including the IIS7, SQL Server Express, .NET Framework and Visual Web Developer.

The platform installer also allows you to install popular PHP-based software quickly and easily on your Windows servers (like WordPress, Drupal and SugarCRM). The walk through helps you to install the software, shows you some of the options you can choose for installable software and what you can find in each of the tabbed sections.

On SitePoint.com today there's a quick tutorial showing how you can quickly and easily install PHP on Windows via the Web Platform Installer.

Earlier this year Microsoft released a small piece of software called the Web Platform Installer (Web PI)—a dead-simple way to install a complete suite of web software on your Windows machine. [...] To show you how simple it is to use and to give you an idea of what software is available, I’ll walk through the installation of PHP with the Web PI, as well as a few key PHP apps from scratch.

Once you have it downloaded and configured, you can go over to the "Web Platform" tab and select PHP to be installed (still in the PHP 5.2 series). Under the web applications tab there's various apps you can also install including WordPress and SugarCRM. Click "Install" and you should be all set - the Installer sets up the webserver (IIS) running PHP and a database (like MySQL or SQL Server).