Mapscript Documentation

[nmunro]

Just some points to help first time users:

1. The Mapscript manual installation does not explain that in addition to php_mapscript.dll you must have all the mapserver dlls available to PHP. Perhaps this is obvious, but it is not that easy to find them all (I used depends.exe) and put them in the php folder, or add the mapserver folder to the PATH. Although the MS4W installation is a good idea, it may not be appropriate for a production server.
2. I may be wrong, but the Apache module does seem to work reliably as long as you explicity load php_mapscript and php_dbase in php.ini (and dl() is now deprecated anyway).
3. You generally need memory_limit increased as the default PHP value is quite low.
4. Took me a while to find out about $map->selectOutputFormat("AGGPNG24") to get anti-aliased output! This is not documented, I eventually found it with a lot of google searches.