Your example of how you compile PHP is interesting, but you don't really go into any detail on why you compile it like that. That's pretty important so people don't try and compile it the same as you and then wonder why they're missing a lot of functionality - for example, and I may be incorrect about what this is doing, but you seem to be turning off a lot of VERY important/useful features, such as PDO, hash, session functionality (??????, why?), simpleXML and Reflection.

Now granted a beginner may not need some of those features, but they're going to be confused as hell when they try to use something like sessions and it's not there. I repeat, turning off session support? And hashes, which I'm assuming has to do with md5 and sha1 support... why turn these off? Reflection maybe, though once you become familiar with it, it's damn near indispensible. SimpleXML maybe... even PDO maybe... but SESSIONS? heh. Why?!
-m