One of the main issues we commonly run into is a non-working .htaccess file.  Apache doesn’t come with .htaccess support automatically turned on.  You’ll have to turn it on in order for .htaccess files to have an effect.  Here’s what you do:

There are two ways,

1. Edit your httpd.conf manually using a text editor like vim, nano, vi, joe whatever you like.
2. Edit your httpd.conf through Webmin

Since the Webmin version is more graphical, we’ll show you how to do it through Webmin.  If you’re using a text editor, just skip to the portion with the AllowOveride command.

1. Login to your Webmin
2. Servers>Apache
3. Go to the Global Configuration tab
4. Click on EDIT CONFIG FILES
5. 
6. Search for AllowOveride and .htaccess and remove the # sign in front or type “AllowOveride All”.

This should fix it permanently and allow your .htaccess files to override pretty much and directive needed.

First of all, PDF Lite is the stripped down but free version of PDFLib. This library allows you to generate PDF files and can be quite handy. The easiest thing is to confuse the two versions, we’re using the Lite version which doesn’t have as many features but it’s free and doesn’t watermark your PDFs. The Lite version is good for just messing around with but if this is a commercial endeavor, you should get the full version found here : http://www.pdflib.com/

This tutorial installs the FREE Lite package version 7.03. Alright, let’s get started:
OS: CentOS 4.5/5,RHEL 4/5
Requires: PECL to be running and available and most likely has to be done as the root user

cd /usr/src
wget http://www.pdflib.com/binaries/PDFlib/703/PDFlib-Lite-7.0.3.tar.gz
tar xzpf PDFlib-Lite-7.0.3.tar.gz
cd PDFlib-Lite-7.0.3
./configure
make
make install
pecl install pdflib

The system will now ask you for the installation location of pdflib (path to pdflib installation?), put in:
/usr/local

Once it’s done installing, let’s finish this up:
cp /usr/local/lib/libpdf.so /usr/include/php/ext
echo "[libpdf]" >> /etc/php.ini
echo "extension=pdf.so" >> /etc/php.ini
service httpd restart

That should do it, check your phpinfo to make sure it works and go make some PDFs.

Part 1 – Install Memcache

Part 2 – Install eAcclerator

Part 3 – Modify WordPress to use Memcache + eAccelerator

PART 1 of 3: Memcache
Memcache aka Memcached is:

...a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load

In layman’s terms, it’s a caching system using RAM to cache your website and make it run quicker. Why would Memcache speed up your site? It basically takes your often hit pages and caches it into RAM. By caching it into RAM, your page doesn’t need to be regenerated as the information is still in memory. Large websites have huge Memcache server farms whose sole purpose is to cache data for quick retrieval, that’s how the big boys do it. Even Howard Stern uses Memcache.

Well we might not have millions of hits and gigabytes of Memcache but even a little bit of Memcache can help medium traffic sites. No, memcache is not for everybody, it doesn’t do you much good if your site doesn’t see much traffic. But if you have a popular WordPress Blog or vBulletin forum, a little Memcache can go a long way.

We have found that Memcache + eAccelerator greatly increases the speed of your site and reduces the overall server load. So you might ask, how do I get Memcache working with WordPress, let’s get started:

NOTE: This article assumes that you have root/admin access to your server. If you are on a hosted/shared webserver, just ask your hosting company to do the work for you and skip to the WordPress Memcache plugin section.

1) First things first, your server must have memcache installed on it. These are CentOS/RHEL instructions, you’ll have to figure out how to do it for Debian/Ubuntu but it should be similar.

Download, Compile and Install Memcache (also installs zlib which is required by Memcache):
mkdir /usr/src/install
cd /usr/src/install
wget http://www.danga.com/memcached/dist/memcached-1.2.2.tar.gz
tar xzvf memcached-1.2.2.tar.gz
cd memcached-1.2.2
yum -y install libevent-devel
./configure
make
make install


2) Install the Memcache PHP extension:
yum -y install zlib-devel
wget http://pecl.php.net/get/memcache-2.1.2.tgz
tar xzvf memcache-2.1.2.tgz
cd memcache-2.1.2


Ok, now you have to find where your “phpize” resides, be careful if you have multiple PHP versions, you have to find the right one:
locate phpize
This should output the location of phpize, you will need to insert it into the following step:

export PHP_PREFIX="PATH_TO_YOUR_PHPIZE_COMMAND"
$PHP_PREFIX ./configure --with-php-config=/hsphere/shared/php5/bin/php-config
make
make install

Now you have to edit php.ini to include Memcache, first locate the correct php.ini file. Again, it should be the main php.ini file:
locate php.ini

Once you have the path to php.ini, you need to edit it to include the Memcache extension
nano PATH_TO_PHP.INI_FILE

INSERT this in there and save your file:
extension=memcache.so

Restart your webserver and you should have Memcache working.