Wordpress is one of the class leading blogs and the one of the most used from personal to enterprise size blogs, proved stability by hosting popular blogs for even automotive manufacturers, most of the people enjoy the facility of the administrator control panel however the installation process behind it is slighty complicated however it depends on what type of hosting do you have.

VEXXHOST WordPress hosting
All of our plans include Fantastico, so instead of going through this whole document in the pain of installing WordPress it, all you need to do is enter Fantastico from your control panel in cPanel, click on “WordPress”, insert the path you want it installed, the username and password for the administrator panel and you’re ready and good to go

Other web hosting platforms

• Head to the WordPress website page http://wordpress.org/download/ and click on “Download”, it should download a zip file that you will place somewhere on your hard disk and unzip it, you’ll have a bunch of folders and files starting with wp
• Upload the extracted folderto your account, you should usually check with your provider’s control panel as there are different ways to login via FTP, we cannot go in detail about every single control panel out there however asking your support staff should help you. A free and good FTP client is SmartFTP at http://smartftp.com
• Create a new clean MySQL database, again this is something that is control panel specific, the procedure is very different from control panel to control panel however in cPanel, it is the easiest to be done using a Wizard, more information and a video tutorial is included here, http://www.cpanel.net/media/tutorials/mysqlwizard.htm — Make sure you get a MySQL username, password and database name to continue our installation.
• Rename the wp-config-sample.php to wp-config.php and replace the fields for it to appear something like the following
  define('DB_NAME', 'putyourdbnamehere'); // The name of the database
define('DB_USER', 'usernamehere'); // Your MySQL username
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'yourpasswordhere'); // ...and password
  Most of the time, you will not need to modify your DB_HOST unless your hosts tell you too, after uploading the renamed wp-config.php file into the main root directory of your hosting, simply go to http://yourdomain.com/dir/wp-admin/install.php where dir is the directory you uploaded WordPress to, if you uploaded it to the root directory of your account, then simply go to http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin/install.php and following the instructions.

That’s basically it for installing WordPress on your web hosting, as you can see the method is a lot easier when using Fantastico with our web hosting platform, happy blogging!

A lot of users who are looking for web hosting usually take the location into matter to add to the complicated equation when looking for a web hosting company however it is not always the most important factor. It’s not completely unimportant but it is important to some point, you would at least want to have the datacenter at least in the same continent.

Of course, you won’t get the best speeds off your web hosting company if you are located in North America, it wouldn’t be the smartest idea to get your web hosting somewhere in southern Asia as it will be very slow & will be crawling for you and most of your clients if they are located in North America.

However, if you do take web hosting in a place such as Montreal, QC which is 5 hours north of New York, NY – The speed will not be that much different if it was actually located in Montreal, QC or New York, NY because the difference between the two is close to nothing at the speeds that the internet runs at.

To conclude, the best idea is to get your web hosting services at a company close to you but not necessarily very close but not necessarily very far that your web site would be very slow.

A lot of people are getting hiring people to install FFMPEG as they think it’s a difficult task, but it’s much easier than you think if you follow these instructions. You should have root access & basic Linux knowledge to the server to follow these instructions.

1. Create a directory to do our work in
mkdir ~/ffmpeg
cd ~/ffmpeg

2. Get all the source files
wget http://www3.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/ essential-20061022.tar.bz2
wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/9225/ flvtool2_1.0.5_rc6.tgz
wget http://easynews.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/ lame/lame-3.97.tar.gz
wget http://superb-west.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/ ffmpeg-php/ffmpeg-php-0.5.0.tbz2
wget http://downloads.xiph.org/releases/ ogg/libogg-1.1.3.tar.gz
wget http://downloads.xiph.org/releases/ vorbis/libvorbis-1.1.2.tar.gz

3. Extract all the source files
bunzip2 essential-20061022.tar.bz2; tar xvf essential-20061022.tar
tar zxvf flvtool2_1.0.5_rc6.tgz
tar zxvf lame-3.97.tar.gz
bunzip2 ffmpeg-php-0.5.0.tbz2; tar xvf ffmpeg-php-0.5.0.tar
tar zxvf libogg-1.1.3.tar.gz
tar zxvf libvorbis-1.1.2.tar.gz

4. Create the codecs directory & import them
mkdir /usr/local/lib/codecs/
mv essential-20061022/* /usr/local/lib/codecs/
chmod -R 755 /usr/local/lib/codecs/

5. Install SVN/Ruby (Depends on OS, this is for RHEL/CentOS)
yum install subversion
yum install ruby
yum install ncurses-devel

6. Get the latest FFMPEG/MPlayer from the subversion
svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg
svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/mplayer/trunk mplayer

7. Compile LAME
cd ~/ffmpeg/lame-3.97
./configure
make
make install

8. Compile libOGG
cd ~/ffmpeg/libogg-1.1.3
./configure
make
make install

9. Compile libVorbis
cd ~/ffmpeg/libvorbis-1.1.2
./configure
make
make install

10. Compile flvtool2
cd ~/ffmpeg/flvtool2_1.0.5_rc6
ruby setup.rb config
ruby setup.rb setup
ruby setup.rb install

11. Compile MPlayer
cd ~/ffmpeg/mplayer
./configure
make
make install

12. Compile FFMPEG
cd ~/ffmpeg/ffmpeg
./configure --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libogg --enable-libvorbis --disable-mmx --enable-shared
echo '#define HAVE_LRINTF 1' >> config.h
make
make install

13. Finalize the codec setups
ln -s /usr/local/lib/libavformat.so.50 /usr/lib/libavformat.so.50
ln -s /usr/local/lib/libavcodec.so.51 /usr/lib/libavcodec.so.51
ln -s /usr/local/lib/libavutil.so.49 /usr/lib/libavutil.so.49
ln -s /usr/local/lib/libmp3lame.so.0 /usr/lib/libmp3lame.so.0
ln -s /usr/local/lib/libavformat.so.51 /usr/lib/libavformat.so.51

14. Compile FFMPEG-PHP
cd ~/ffmpeg/ ffmpeg-php-0.5.0
phpize
./configure
make
make install

15. Install FFMPEG-PHP (make sure the php.ini path is correct.)
echo 'extension=/usr/local/lib/php/extensions/ no-debug-non-zts-20020429/ffmpeg.so' >> /usr/local/Zend/etc/php.ini

16. Restart Apache to load FFMPEG-PHP (Depends on OS, this is for RHEL/CentOS)
service httpd restart

17. Verify if it works
php -r 'phpinfo();' | grep ffmpeg

If you get a few lines such as
ffmpeg
ffmpeg support (ffmpeg-php) => enabled
ffmpeg-php version => 0.5.0
ffmpeg.allow_persistent => 0 => 0

Then everything is installed and working. FFMPEG, FFMPEG-PHP, MPlayer, MEncoder, flv2tool, LAME MP3 encoder & libOGG.

PHP5 has brought so much new features but because of its big syntax changes, a big percentage of the PHP developing base has not made the change. Here are the top 10 new features that could change your mind.

5: Better error handling with exceptions
I’m sure every PHP developer had been staring at the famous white screen with a “Syntax error” clueless at where the error is really at. With PHP5, you can actually handle PHP errors and do whatever you want with them, but that’s not all. They have also included exceptions which I’m sure most C++ or Java developers use. The good part is that instead of simply failing on with close no errors to you, you could put a few checks before and information you could need such as maybe a print_r() on an array. I have written an article about this: http://vexxhost.com/blog/?p=21

4: Completely rewritten MySQL extension
The MySQL databases are the PHP’s partner in crime. Many developers use this database system in their website’s because it is on of the easiest, free, open-source database software. However, its performance combined with PHP4 was close to poor. Introduced with PHP5 is a newer, rewritten, optimized MySQL extension which was also compatible with MySQL 5.0. It has also introduced other functions such as: Prepared statements, SSL connections, Multi-query functions.

3: A heck of a lot more useful functions
I have a few favorite PHP5 functions which speed up time while coding & enhances the website’s performance. One of my favorites is the __autoload() function – What it does that it would be called if a class that was created and did not exist. It provides you with the class name. This is useful because you don’t need to manage what includes you need for X and Y file and reduces the load for those who simply include all the classes in for every single PHP file. Also, another favorite is file_put_contents() which reduces the 6 lines of code to add something to one.

2: Finally! SQLite database support!
I’m sure a lot of developers will be happy about this one. While MySQL is very popular among most PHP developers, SQLite is much different than it. It actually uses normal files and reads them. It does not need a daemon (or called server) to run in order to execute any queries on it. It makes a better smaller database for these low traffic sites.

1: The best damn OOP support period
PHP programmers have spent an awful of long time trying to create hacks so in order that PHP can make a better OO programming language. Finally, they are rewarded with OO support that either PHP3 or PHP4 can match. It has anything you usually see in most of the other established coding languages. From Constructors, Destructors, Public, protected, private properties & methods, Interfaces, Abstract classes, Class type hints, Static properties and methods, Final properties and methods & a whole suite of magical methods.

That’s the top 5 for me. I hope you think that PHP5 deserves a try! (and we offer it with our hosting plans!)

You’ve probably heard of ffmpeg-php and it’s wide usability mostly in sites that involve with videos such as YouTube or any other similar site. Here’s a bit of an introduction to it and how to use it.

First thing, you’ve got to check that your web hosting provider actually has ffmpeg & ffmpeg-php extension installed on your account and then you could get started with ffmpeg. You can check if it’s installed by creating a PHP script and executing the following code:

extension_loaded('ffmpeg') or die("ffmpeg extension not loaded");

If you get “ffmpeg extension not loaded” then your web hosting provider does not have ffmpeg installed, if you get nothing, then you’re one the good track!

ffmpeg-php is very simple to learn, what it is pretty much is an interface that works with the ffmpeg software to make it easier for PHP developers to access.

Like any object in PHP, you’ll have to start with creating a new instance of it. You can do that by using the following line:

$ffmpegInstance = new ffmpeg_movie(“/path/to/movie/”);

Now that you’ve had that, you can use that instance to use the many features of ffmpeg-php which are from knowing the duration of the movie/audio in seconds to retrieving the bitrate of the movie/audio file.

Once here, it’s pretty much like object oriented programming, ex:
$ffmpegInstance->getDuration(); // Gets the duration in secs.
$ffmpegInstance->getVideoCodec(); // What type of compression/codec used

This can be very helpful when coding anything that has to do with uploading videos because you can know a lot of information about it. I’ve made a small script that pretty much retrieves all the information that ffmpeg can get right here