In the following sentence, should I use a comma or a semi-colon after same?
The live and staging set-ups are the same, combining PHP, MySQL and Apache to power the websites.
or
The live and staging set-ups are the same; combining PHP, MySQL and Apache to power the websites.
The first sentence (using a comma rather than a semicolon) is more correct.
However, you will see the second semi-often. The issue in this case is that there are other commas in the sentence, not used for clause separation. Many people will sometimes use a semicolon in this case to make it stand out more from the other commas, which are just used for enumerating a list, rather than separating a subordinate clause.
