I recently came across this cool apache trick. You can change the value of a PHP configuration variable using a .htaccess file in your server. For instance if you wanted to change the include_path php configuration variable you could use the following .htaccess command:

php_value include_path /new/include/path:/other/include/path

Every PHP file contained in the same directory, or child directories of the .htaccess command will have the include_path variable changed to the new value.

Its strange that there isn’t much documentation available about the php_value derivative, no information is available on apache.org, and even google didn’t seem to turn up any ‘real’ documentation about the command.