Challenges of development with PHP

I would be interested to hear what other people find the challenges are when developing sites with PHP for their clients?

I find one of the most annoying situations is a set up where, for whatever reason, you have to build on a development server and get everything working perfectly.

Then when you have to move over to the live server something funny goes wrong, or there is even a different version of PHP running meaning that some code has to be tweaked here and there.

Generally migrating from one server to another is a bit of a pain even if it is just updating database connection settings; there always seems to be something that doesn't work or some script that has a hard-coded variable lurking there which stops the script working when it is switched to a new server!

Re : Challenges of development with PHP

It's not really a PHP problem but the general problem is... the clients themselves!

What strategies are there for working with clients who are a nightmare?! I find it can be very hard to tell upfront and so sometimes it is too late to realise they are going to be a real pain until you are committed to the project... you know, the ones that always want to change the colours a hundred times, change their minds on the layout, one minute like it then their mate says its rubbish and they agree...

How do you manage your clients?