On Linux, I need to ask what your favorite installation options are for
a PHP app as a kind of poll. In Part 1, I discussed the Install Wizard
preference that you might have. In Part 2, here, I'm trying to decide
which options you prefer for the Database Configuration.
Consider SugarCRM. It's really an SDK that you customize. Knowing that,
you might want to download about 4 to 30 different PHP/CRM products,
try out which one you like, and then try to customize 3-4 of your top
choices, before you finally decide on which one is your favorite and go
with that. Most of these will also need to auto-detect the way you have
your MySQL or PGSQL database and try to create a database automatically
for you. If there is any false move or false assumption by one of these
organizations trying to pitch their app to you and you might be turned
off not to use it. About the only thing known on Linux is that you
might have PHP 4.x installed and a MySQL and PGSQL database.
Without getting into a war here over database choices, I really prefer
PostgreSQL for many reasons but want to make my app such that a
developer could customize it fairly easily for MySQL in about 1 to 2
weeks, single-handedly.
Different from MySQL, PostgreSQL has this notoriously wonderful
security feature in that it isn't connectable, right out of the box,
until you edit a couple of files and bounce the daemon. Even at that,
one file in particular, the pg_hba.conf, may be edited in about 4 to 8
different ways, depending on the type of choices a developer wants to
make. If you've played with PGSQL before, you might know that you can
enable the PHP app to connect only via local access under a certain
username, local access/any username, remote access/certain username,
remote/any username, and all of the above with or without a password.
(There are other options, but I've predicted that these are the most
common.)
Another concern is that some developers may prefer that the app connect
to the database under a different account than "root".
Knowing this, what kinds of things should the install wizard do and say
in trying to set up a database on Linux with PHP and PostgreSQL?
