RHEL is great with updates

I use RHEL and CENTOS at work. And they're awesome except when they're missing the latest and greatest packages you need.

here is a list of some of them:

This is a update of DAG's old stuff and Rpmforge's re-branding
http://repoforge.org/

Remi usually has the latest PHP updates, critical for web servers
http://rpms.famillecollet.com/

3rd party packages from the fedora project which will work with RHEL and CENTOS
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL

Here is a quick tutorial on how to add a repo to yum

download the packages
#wget http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm
#wget http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/remi-release-6.rpm

install them
#sudo rpm -Uvh remi-release-6*.rpm epel-release-6*.rpm

Personally I never enable 3rd party repos so their updates will not conflict with my standard packages so will install the package I want as demonstrated below

#yum --enablerepo=remi install php

enable the repo
#sudo vim /etc/yum.repos.d/remi.repo

Edit the [remi] portion of the file so that the enabled option is set to 1. This will enable the remi repository.

name=Les RPM de remi pour Enterprise Linux $releasever - $basearch
#baseurl=http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/$releasever/remi/$basearch/
mirrorlist=http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/$releasever/remi/mirror
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-remi
failovermethod=priority