FreeBSD newbie (not PHP newbie)

Hi all, I've recently been landed with a FreeBSD machine upon which I need to put the latest stable version of PHP from the snapshots, as we have a problem with the release version of 4.2.2. The ports collection is new to me, as is cvsupit, but from what I can gather things aren't going to be pretty if I simply try to compile the PHP from the source as I would on, say, RedHat, and plug it in to Apache with APXS. Ideally I'd like to use ports / cvsupit to get the latest stable release snapshot, so as to preserve system integrity, but I can't figure out how! It seems that I need to have a port of a specific package to properly integrate it into the system - is this the case? Or _can_ I just do a ./configure && make && make install as I would have on other versions of linux? I'm using Apache 2.0.39. Thanks in advance! Andy