Planning Your Installation of PHP

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The first step in installing PHP is to download it. PHP is open -source software and thus is ever-changing. Every day/week/month the software is improving, so I encourage you to look only to the Internet for PHP. The versions of PHP distributed on CDs are often out of date.

What to Download

Unlike software such as ASP or ColdFusion (but like the early days of Perl), you need to manually install PHP. You can download an automatic Windows installer for PHP, but it's often better to install PHP manually. The automatic installer does not include all PHP modules and is limited to IIS, PWS, Xitami, and Apache web servers, whereas you have full flexibility with a manual installation. This chapter covers the steps for installing PHP both manually and using the installer. As we run through these methods , I will explore the pros and cons of each.

Optimization Considerations

You can optimize PHP with a product from Zend called the Zend Optimizer (covered in the section "Zend Optimizer"). Before downloading PHP, you should consider whether you want to optimize PHP with this product. If you do, you should first check the Zend Technologies Ltd. web site (http://www.zend.com) to see what version of PHP the Zend Optimizer supports, and then download that version of PHP. In considering whether you want to use Zend Optimizer, be aware of what web server you are using. The gain in speed from the optimizer might not be more than what you would get from simply running PHP as an Apache module. Although no actual benchmarks on this are available, it's worth considering which speed-gain method works best for you.

Compiling PHP

PHP can be compiled from its source code. Sadly, most of the documentation for this is aimed at the Linux community, because you must compile PHP for this OS. It is quite rare to compile PHP on the Windows OS. Unless you want to stay on the cutting edge of PHP and want to compile PHP every time its source changes, you won't need to compile it. You can find further information on compiling PHP at http://www.php.net/manual/en/install.windows.php.

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