Add PHP 5.x support

[miccheng]

You know i had to ask... :D

[dqminh]

@miccheng what's the standard development stack for PHP 5.x now ? And which version of PHP should we add ?

[chuyeow]

I'm not a PHP guy (not for a long time, at least) but I've had to setup WordPress blogs for people recently, and I know of these choices:

1. Nginx + php-fpm
2. Apache + mod_php

I prefer Nginx + php-fpm but it might not be the best thing for have as a development environment since there are 2 moving parts compared to Apache + mod_php. Is there a standard, @miccheng?

Anyway, do you guys think PHP should be an autoparts package, or it's better to just have PHP as a choice of a box?

[miccheng]

Agreed. The preferred is Apache + mod_php as its easier to setup and manage. Managing php-fpm as a separate thing can be a hassle on a small dev environment. Although in PHP 5.4, we added a build-in web server.

[miccheng]

Then we probably need to add support for PEAR (a package manager for PHP extensions) and Composer (dependency manager).

[miccheng]

@dqminh We ought to support 5.4 and 5.5 (5.3 has reached end of life - no longer supported).

[petejkim]

lots of php developers still rely on stuff like htaccess so i guess apache is the way to go

[petejkim]

i was actually working on a apache package earlier, will revisit it when i get some time

4b093cf

[miccheng]

Thanks for making this a reality.