ZendPHPviaFastCGI Gives 500 Internal Server Error

Been having a fun time today trying to get Magento CMS working. The bizarre situation was that PHP would work fine under the default web site, but not under any other web site, which would result in a 500 Internal Server Error caused by the ZendPHPviaFastCGI PHP handler mapping. See screenshot below. I of course tried every possible solution without success, the cause turned out to be rather obscure.

 

fastcgi error

 

 

What was required to fix this was to manually add this attribute to the handler mapping in the applicationHost.config file, which you will find in C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv\config.

 

allowPathInfo="true"

 

PathInfo refers to the additional path information that may follow the file name and extension in a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI). For example, if you request the URI http://localhost/test.dll/myinfo, the PathInfo portion of that URI is /myinfo

This parameter does not seem to exist in the IIS Manager and is not even mentioned in the handler docs so I really do really not know why this is required or why it is not there by default and why you cannot add it via the GUI.

 

So the final entry for my ZendPHPviaFastCGI handler looked like this.

 

<add name="ZendPHPviaFastCGI" path="*.php" verb="*" modules="FastCgiModule"

scriptProcessor="C:\Program Files (x86)\Zend\ZendServer\bin\php-cgi.exe"

resourceType="Either" requireAccess="Script" allowPathInfo="true" />

 

Credit must go to my buddy Matt Gahan for working this one out.

PCI Compliance for Dummies

pci_for_dummies

PCI DSS compliance is now a legal requirement for anyone with merchant services, having just had to go through this myself and knowing that our clients are also going to have to do the same, I started searching for a simple guide that I could pass on to clients and came across this book.

 

Complying with the PCI Data Security Standard may seem like a daunting task for merchants. This book is a quick guide to understanding how to protect cardholder data and comply with the requirements of PCI - from surveying the standard's requirements to detailing steps for verifying compliance.

PCI Compliance for Dummies arms you with the facts, in plain English, and shows you how to achieve PCI Compliance.

 

And yes my company BlueThunder Internet is fully PCI DSS compliant before you ask :-)

Time Tracking and Source Control for FREE

time-tracking

 

For quite some time now I have been using ProWorkFlow for my time tracking and project management, which I found to be the most fully featured of all the project management solutions I tried and really is very good. However the amount of development work I do these days is very small, so I couldn't really warrant paying for something that gets used so rarely, so I decided it was time to look for an alternative and preferably FREE solution.

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Adobe Incontext Editing

ICE_marquee

I recently came across this rather nifty new service (called ICE for short) from Adobe, which essentially allows you to add basic content management facilities to any website with zero coding and allow your clients to manage it via their browser. You just take a simple flat HTML page, add in some markup to identify editable regions and your done. Granted it has very basic WYSIWYG capabilities, but it is perfect for those small clients who only want basic editing capabilities and don't have much money to spend on implementing a fully featured solution even with an open source CMS such as the very cool Mura CMS.

If you already use Dreamweaver then you already have everything you need to get started and easily create Incontext editable regions, but there are in fact no special requirements for using this service, you do not need to use Dreamweaver other than to create the javascript files, so you could in effect just download a Dreamweaver trial to see how it works and get the code then you can insert the required markup via notepad if you wish. To use the service all you need to do is sign up for an Adobe ID, and then login to the IncontextEditing Admin portal. From here you setup and manage your sites. Check out the getting started video below.

Currently the InContext Editing service is FREE and in the forums Adobe have quoted that it will remain free until 2011, after which it will be a subscription service costing $10-$20 per month. This information was actually quite hard to find, I tried calling Adobe to enquire about pricing, I spoke to customer services, sales and technical support and amazingly no-one had any idea what Incontext Editing was or that it was even an Adobe product.

To get started with ICE try out these tutorials.