PHP without my hands on the wheel

I'm thrilled to have had the opportunity over the past few months to work in PHP on a client's leased (shared, not dedicated) webserver; nevertheless, I don't think I've ever felt so constricted in my life. I desperately need the capabilities of PHPLib, for example, but as a mere tenant on a large server, I have no hope of having the php3.ini file configured to redirect the auto_include path for my sake. Specifically, I need air-tight session management; dealing with users of my webapp whose portfolio management can stretch across several different pages, I don't have to tell you what a nightmare awaits when users depend on hidden form variables/URL passes, easily destroyed by expired caches, inadvertent page reloads and reposts, unfinished business/halfheartedness on the part of the customer... and then, of course, there's the obvious security issue.

I guess I'm looking for a PHPLIB Lite edition, or suggestions as to how a developer with his hands tied such as mine goes about setting up decent session management. So many of these posts on this board and most of the lists out there assume you have your hands on the joystick; increasingly, this just isn't the case (or those web developers developing for small-scale clients on shared servers aren't unleashing the power of PHP).

Though session management is the primary reason for this post, along the same lines, I feel as though I've been treading water for weeks trying to unearth some obscure solution for JPG/GIF background scaling capability (along the lines of gdlib or ImageMagick) WITHOUT having access to 1) a GD-ready PHP build; 2) the outrageous memory overhead required to run Imagemagick; 3) the patience to learn the intricacies of UNIX/Linux software compilation/installation for the want of a simple image resizing routine. That may sound blasphemous to you guys, but this is not the time. Fact is, I'd *love* to have my own box on which to install/play with Linux, install my own builds of PHP, MySQL, even the Linux freeware clone of Civilization II... but I'd rather wait until the time when I really have access to the necessary resources.

Any suggestions would be appreciated--and I should note that both Jumpline and CIHost really don't deserve a lot of the praise I've seen being passed around on here. If any of the above questions had been given the time of day by support staff at either company, I wouldn't be writing this right now. CIHost, I think, got its mouth full after boasting for months that its support team could respond (helpfully) in 10 hours or less; I was getting used to three or four days to hear that these issues fell under their no-third-party-support policy until they finally pulled the guarantee off the site and I finally quit asking. Jumpline is just plain unresponsive, and both have, from what I can tell, fairly maxed out loads on their shared servers. Between 3-8pm CIHost all but grinds to a complete halt.

Anyway, sorry about the long post. Anything anyone has to offer would be appreciated.

It's not required that you have PHPLib load up via reference in php3.ini.

For each script that requires session managment, just put a 'include("/path/to/phplib/prepend.php3")' statement.

According to the documentation, even this won't work if the include_path statement in the php3.ini file isn't modified. Just checked: makes sense. After just a casual look through some of the include files, they make calls between one another (assuming you've set that path) CONSTANTLY. Am I going to need to go through and prepend absolute pathnames to every one of those references?

Apache allows php directives in the .htaccess file:

php3_include_path ".:/path/to/include/dir"
php3_error_log "/path/to/error/log/php_errors"
php3_error_reporting 15

I've had success with this, my provider (Affinity) does not allow access to php3.ini or httpd.conf. More information is available at:

http://www.php.net/manual/configuration.php3#CONFIGURATION.FILE



[This message has been edited by donarb (edited 11-03-99).]