This year I’ve decided to enter the EuroWinPHP contest, as I figured it might be interesting to learn a bit more about how PHP works on Windows. I originally started using it there, back in around 2002, running early versions of Apache 1.3 and PHP 4.1 on Windows 98 and 2000. These days, though, I’m running IIS7 and PHP 5.3.2, and have a bit more knowledge of how the bits fit together, though since I’ve been running Linux for the last 5 years I’m a little out of touch.

The project I’ve opted to do is something I’ve been thinking about for a little while, but not got around to developing until now. It’s named GarnetCMS, and the idea is to create a CMS that uses the features of PHP 5.3, such as closures, and based around a signal/slot mechanism. The idea is to initially develop it to use NoSQL datastores, and I intend to create back ends for Microsoft Azure and MongoDB at first. If I do things correctly, though, adding a traditional RDBMS back end later on should be relatively simple.

Development-wise, I’m trying out Mercurial for version control, and using Bitbucket to store the code - the project will be on there at http://bitbucket.org/mgdm/garnet-cms/ once it gets going. I’m intending to try out Komodo Edit, because while I do love GVim on Windows it doesn’t quite fit with the “complete change” I’m going for with most other things! TortoiseHg seems quitenice so far, and I’ve managed to get IIS up and running, so now all I need to do is get coding. I’m quite looking forward to seeing how it turns out.