Now that I installed MySQL, got the apache server running and WordPress installed, I am facing another problem.
The version of PHP included in Mac OS X seems to be an old one (that’s fine) without XSL transformations support (not ok) as it is not compiled into the module.
The one programming language I continuously use during the day is XSLT combined with a lot of XML documents and webservices. I need XSL, really, and I cannot live without XSL support, no way.
I could download the source code, find all the libraries, find the commands to compile and fix everything manually. But it is just easier to download the PHP package from Marc Liyanaga.
First you should disable the PHP4 module in the Apache config file, because if you install on top of that it will give you some strange errors. It will not remove the Apple module, but Apache will try to load both modules and that is something to avoid.
Download the package [PHP 5.2.4 for Apache 1.3], install and try the phpinfo file you created before, and you will see that you have a running version of PHP5.
I checked the configuration and it seems to have XSL support.
None of the code I wrote before ran without problems, everything resulted in a fatal error. After some time I figured out that the XSL module has changed extensively
As a result of that none of the code I wrote before will work, ever again.
At the moment I have PHP4 without XLST support installed, and a PHP5 version with XSLT support.
I tried Fink with the Finkcommander but they only have PHP modules for Apache 2, so no luck with that either.
This might not be a big problem for you, but I want to make sure the plugin I am writing, works on as many platforms as possible. and that includes PHP4.
I could not find any statistics on how many hosts have switched to PHP4, I think not they are many.
The PHP website mentions that PHP4 will no longer be supported from January 2008, so I guess I am going to develop for PHP5 and hope for the better.