Most of our server platforms are running Linux of one kind or another. Occasionally requirements arise that FreeBSD platforms are needed to allow projects to proceed. In this article we present a record of a recent setup for our test server running FreeBSD 8.1 as a guest on VMware. It covers installation of Apache, MySQL, and PHP for preparation of installing Joomla! 1.5.

Today I upgraded the Joom!Fish on my server to version 2.1 pre-release 2, and got a surprise when Joom!Fish's Control Panel showed a blank screen. Since my server had been running with Joom!Fish 2.1 pre1 installed for quite a while without any problem, I didn't expect the upgrade would break anything significant.

Quickly I checked the error log on the server. The last entry clearly explains what went wrong with the new version. The program /administrator/components/com_joomfish/models/cpanel.php failed to create a DOMDocument object.

After more than a year in developping, we now see the light at the end of the Joomla! 1.6 development tunnel. During the last week of April, Joomla! Team published a rough timeline of Joomla! 1.6 in an article titled "Joomla! 1.6 Development Shifting Gears." In that article, Louis Landry, who is the Joomla! Development Coordinator and Architect, laid out a timeline of releases at various development stages. Even though almost all of those releases lack set release dates. It can still provide us a general idea when we can expect to get our hands on a functional Joomla! 1.6.

As mentioned in a previous article, the coming Joomla! 1.6 will require PHP 5.2.x or above in order to work or even install. Recently I am planning to test drive Joomla! 1.6 Alpha, so the first thing on my to-do list is to upgrade the PHP 5.1.6 currently running on my testing server to PHP 5.2.x. Unfortunately the OS I am using, CentOS 5.3, doesn't yet officially provide the needed upgrade. That forced me to look for the upgrade from other sources.

One quick search revealed a few third parties repositories that may contain PHP 5.2.x. In the end I chose to retrieve the package from a semi-official CentOS repository, CentOS-Testing, which is the repository hosted by CentOS team to test out new or improved packages before putting them into one of their official channels. Those packages are not officially supported, and are not garanteed to function properly. Please use them with care.