Over the years I've come across some useful tricks in PHP that are not obvious, but are worth mentioning. This is not meant to be a comprehensive list of all the useful tricks that you can do with PHP.

Drupal is a great CMS but is a bit hefty when you host it on bargain-basement shared hosting, and virtual private servers are great but memory-constrained at the low-end. Apache can be a big offender when it comes to resource usage, so a nice alternative is nginx, a fast, light-weight and efficient http server that supports PHP via PHP-FastCGI.

Facebook's re-written PHP to transform the dynamic language for fast performance on web-scale server farms without adding additional hardware. The site's engineers have announced HipHop, which turns the popular and dynamic PHP code into highly optimized but static C++ and then compiles it using the GNU C++ compiler, g++.

On Tuesday, Facebook is expected to unveil changes to PHP, the language that helped make the social networking site a success - along with millions of other web sites. SD Times has outed the planned change here. Facebook wouldn't provide details when contacted by The Reg but said it would make more details available Tuesday morning, Pacific time.

LAMP is short for Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. This tutorial shows how you can install an Apache2 webserver on a Fedora 12 server with PHP5 support (mod_php) and MySQL support.

This tutorial shows how to set up a Mandriva 2010.0 Free (x86_64) server that offers all services needed by ISPs and hosters: Apache web server (SSL-capable), Postfix mail server with SMTP-AUTH and TLS, BIND DNS server, Proftpd FTP server, MySQL server, Dovecot POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc.

This is a detailed description about how to set up a Fedora 12 server that offers all services needed by ISPs and hosters: Apache web server (SSL-capable) with PHP5/Ruby/Python, Postfix mail server with SMTP-AUTH and TLS, BIND DNS server, Proftpd FTP server, MySQL server, Dovecot POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc.