PHP Installation guides for IIS are a dime a dozen on the Internet these days (though there are only a handful I've seen that I'd consider accurate), however there is not a lot of guidance for uninstalling PHP from IIS. Being able to fully, and cleanly uninstall PHP from your Windows environment is very important for troubleshooting and ensuring a clean environment to do PHP upgrades. This guide details the steps you need to take to fully and cleanly uninstall PHP from IIS.

RoundCube Webmail is an web based IMAP client that uses AJAX to provide a drag and drop interface that operates very much like a regular desktop application. RoundCube is Open Source and PHP based using a MySQL or Postgres database for data storage with a presentation layer that is fully skinnable using XHTML and CSS 2. Feature wise RoundCube includes things such as multilingual support, MIME support, personal address book, folder management, message searching and spell checking just to name a few. I've been using RoundCube for several years now to access my personal email from all corners of the globe, and I absolutely swear by it which is why I've decided to write this install guide for IIS.

The PHP group have just released PHP 5.2.6 containing over 120 bug fixes, with several of them being security related. This is the first production release of PHP since PHP 5.2.5 was released back in early November last year, so it is good to see things are moving along.

Cacti is an open source PHP/MySQL based graphing and monitoring solution designed to utilise the very powerful RRDTool data logging tool by Tobias Oetiker. Using RRDTool, Cacti is capable of graphing and monitoring everything from network interface usage to temperature. Basically anything that can log data in a format RRDTool can read can be graphed and monitored by Cacti. In this guide we'll look at the steps necessary to install Cacti into your IIS environment.

Previously using PHP4 with FastCGI I was using eAccelerator as my PHP opcode / bytecode accelerator as APC was too unstable causing several crashes a week. However since upgrading to PHP 5.2.5 using ISAPI I have migrated across to APC and to date have found it to be very stable. So I thought it about time that I cover the topic of installing APC into your PHP environment for IIS, which is what we'll cover in this article.

Last week I wrote about the different location in Windows where php.ini is loaded from. The values set in your php.ini configuration file are global and will be set for every PHP environment on your server. What happens though if you want to configure different PHP environment settings for each site on your server, or even different PHP settings for directories within a site? This can be done with the ini_set() function, but as not all of us are coders or have the time to work code modifications in there is another option; the registry, which is the method which we'll be looking at in this article.

Once you have sucessfully installed PHP on IIS you'll find it is a highly configurable environment. Since PHP 4 all your master level configuration directives have been stored in a file called php.ini as touched on briefly in my PHP installation guide linked to earlier. Once you have configured you directives in this file the next trick is to ensure that it is loaded by your PHP environment which can be done several different ways which will be discussed in this article.

PHP is technically a platform independent language, however when developing PHP web applications you still need to be aware of the differences in the web server platform you are developing for, and also keep in consideration the possibility for migration between platforms into the future. I found this article some time ago which compares Apache and IIS PHP server array superglobal keys.