To install the new XAMPP ensure you firstly uninstall and remove your current XAMPP folder. Upgrades are not supported with this version due to the differences one of which is the removal of PHP4 support from the XAMPP package.
I like to install agavi via the pear package that is available:
- Open a command prompt and navigate to your XAMPP directory eg. D:\xampp\php
- Execute:
- pear channel-discover pear.agavi.org
- pear config-set auto_discover 1
- pear config-set preferred_state beta
- pear install -a agavi/agavi
- Wait for a bit as it installs
- Execute the command agavi and you will get a phing error
To rectify the error we must complete a little bit of a hack to trick the agavi batch file into recognising our phings version is greater than 2.3.1. Navigate into your XAMPP PEAR folder (D:\xampp\php\PEAR\phing) and create a new directory called ‘etc’. Inside your ‘etc’ directory create a new text file called ‘VERSION.TXT’ containing the following text ‘Phing 2.3.3 BRANCH (2.3dev)’.
Try executing the agavi command on the command line again and you should have a successful response like:
D:\xampp\php>agavi
Agavi > status:
[echo] PHP:
[echo] Version: 5.2.8
[echo] Include path: .;D:xamppphppear
[echo]
[echo] Phing:
[echo] Version: Phing 2.3.3 BRANCH (2.3dev)
[echo]
[echo] Agavi:
[echo] Installation directory: D:xamppphppearagavi
[echo] Version: 1.0.0-beta6
[echo] URL: http://www.agavi.org
[echo]
[echo] Project:
[echo] (not found)
[echo]
[echo] For a list of possible build targets, call this script with the -l a
rgument.D:\xampp\php>
Hope that helps you out and you can continue to follow the official tutorial.

Simon,
thanks for this walk-through. The Phing problem is, of course, due to Apachefriends not having bundled Phing properly; the entire data directory part is missing, so a lot of XSL-based tasks will not work either.
They also didn’t bother to ship the license information for any of the bundled PEAR packages, which isn’t very nice of them…
Yep thats right re Phing. The Xampp 1.7 package also has a dud copy of the libmysql.dll included so any PDO operations cause the Apache instance to crash. The cure steps are available here: http://www.apachefriends.org/f/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=32617
Thanks for stopping by my site and answering my Agavi questions on IRC the other night!