The PHP package is just brimful of capabilities that you can enable if you have the appropriate extra pieces installed on your system. For instance, one of PHP's strong points is its simple and easy interface to numerous different database system such as Oracle, MySQL, mSQL, DB2, and so on.

You enable these extensions by letting the ./php/php3/configure script know about them when you invoke it. For example, if you want to be able to use MySQL and XML within your PHP scripts (or PHP pages), you might invoke it as

    % ./configure --with-mysql --with-xml

To see a list of the extensions that PHP can support, invoke the script as

    % ./configure --help

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