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PHP4 Installation Overview

Page 12 — Adding Functionality

Extensions (DLLs) are used on Windows systems to add functionality to PHP. The official distribution does not provide every possible extension, just some popular (and tested) ones that the developers feel are suitable for prime time. The following function sets, however, are pre-compiled into the official distribution of PHP4, and therefore do NOT require additional extensions:

  • Regular expression support
  • Dynamic library support
  • Internal Sendmail support
  • Perl-compatible regular expression support
  • ODBC support
  • Session support
  • XML support
  • MySQL support

To use Windows extensions, simply place the files in your PHP directory and then modify the extension_dir entry in the php.ini file, to point to that directory. Next, you have to activate the extensions. To do so, open php.ini in your text editor and follow these steps:

  1. Look for a section that starts like this:
    ;Windows Extensions
    
  2. For each extension you want to use, take away the semicolon before the name if the file is in the list.
  3. If the file is not in the list, add it:
    extension=[your_extension_name].dll
    
  4. After changing anything in the php.ini file, check the output of phpinfo() to verify your changes.

TIP: Do not be confused by the following line in the Extensions section:

;extension=php_mysql.dll

If you want to use MySQL with PHP on Windows, you do not need a file called php_mysql.dll and do not need to uncomment that line. MySQL support is built into the official distribution of PHP4 and no additional files or changes to php.ini are necessary to enable support.

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