John Mertic

It’s almost been a year now since the first testing release the of the installer came out ( http://news.php.net/php.internals/24929 ). I would like to thank everyone who has used and provided feedback on it; as my first real contribution to PHP and Open Source in general, it has been a very rewarding experience.

I am always looking for any suggestions for improvements to the installer. I’m also curious how people are using it; is it just for personal development, or is there anyone using it to deploy to a group of desktops or servers?

I’ll be wandering around at OSCON in two weeks, mostly in the PHP tracks. If you are using the installer, I’d like to meet you and hear any feedback you may have.

Just wanted to say thanks to Edin for getting the installer building alongside the normal snapshot builds.

The big thing that got this done was going thru the Feature list and removing those Features without Components that where in the Extensions.wxs file. However, the XPath queries were spotty at best. The clean way of doing this by iterating thru all of the ComponentRefs in ExtensionFeatures.wxs and doing an XPath query on each one would often skip many results, so I had to do the less-than-elegant way and iterate thru the results of getElementsByTagName(”Component”) for each ComponentRef. At least it works now…

I’m also working on the making the installer work for PHP 6; it’s mostly a bunch of %s/php5/php6/g thru the files, so it should be out there relatively quickly.

I finally have the updates to the PHP Manual for using the new installer, check it out at http://www.php.net/manual/en/install.windows.installer.msi.php. It goes into advanced usage for command line installations and the various options you have when doing one. A definite must read if you want to deploy PHP via Group Policies or a silent installation.

Thanks to the phpdoc team for letting me add this documentation ( and special thanks to Nuno Lopes for ( patiently ) helping me get the documentation correctly formatted ).