It took me a while but here's a new toy. Today I publish my own PHP fork based on the PHP 5.3.6 code base with a few changes that make the everydays developer life more bearable. It includes some of the patches I've already published about 3 years ago, my defcon extension and also my infusion extension plus a good bunch of extra gimmickries.

Updates in his release available on github) include:

• Hardcoded constants
• Turn off $_REQUEST variable if it's not needed
• new methods like str_random, ob_fwrite, sigfig and strcal
• changes in foreach, strstr and binary number handling
• updates to MySQLi/mysqlnd to return matched rows and mysqi_return

The community reaction to this fork has been divided - some think the work put into these changes should have been submitted to the main PHP project instead and others see it as a good step forward for the language. Share your thoughts by commenting on the post.

I got it all working in a few hours after LOTS of headbanging, mouse throwing and blaspheming. All the bugs I found along the way have since been fixed in the 2.0 branch by the Ellis developers or myself. While this does not mean everything is running perfectly [in PyroCMS] , at the time of writing all the worrying bugs are squashed so it should be safe for us to have a play.

He covers a few things like changes to the model class names, the use of plugins (or how you won't anymore), how they've dropped the validation class, that modular separation won't work out of the box and a few more. You can grab the latest version of the CodeIgniter 2.0 branch from the EllisLab bitbucket account (and contribute back if you find a bug!)

symfony 1.0.0 beta2 is completely compatible with beta1, so you don't need to launch the upgrade task if your project is already running on beta1.

Updates included with this release include:

• Better compatibility with PHP 5.0.X
• PEAR dependency has been removed
• New COPYRIGHT file and licenses/ directory
• Phing is now bundled with symfony

The PHP world is really excited about the upcoming release of PHP 6.0. Amongst all the uncertainties in any new release, PHP 6.0 seems to be getting rid of three of the earlier troublesome features: register_globals, magic_quotes_gpc and safe_mode. The first was a big security hole, the second messed with the data and made changing environments quite difficult, while the third was usually misread, and provided a false sense of security. There's also quite a lot of work scheduled to do with Unicode.

Other large changes are mentioned as well, like the the addition of new 64-bit integers and that the ereg extension is removed, while the XMLReader, XMLWriter and Fileinfo extensions are added to the core, and by default are on. Check out the entire post for the full listing.

As PHP keeps added language features one of the things we have to do is figure out how to document them. Lately I've been hearing requests for a way to document virtual properties and methods on classes that are implemented using __call etc.

After talking a bit with Greg, I'm leaning towards adding in some new docblock tags to classes to allow these methods/properties to be documented.

He includes a code example for the documentation method suggested on these new functionality bits. He also asks for comments/ideas on how to hald these sorts of updates in the future.

Following release of the PHP Developers Meeting in Paris (November 11th and 12th, 2005), the International PHP Magazine polled the community to find out What they were looking our for, the most, in PHP 6?

The results of the poll suggest almost an equal weightage to all of the points noted in the developer meeting minutes. Of the 809 members polled, 15-20% of the respondents were looking out for OO functionality changes, functionality cleanup, performance boost, Security enhancements, and unicode support, in that order. Only 7% were keen to see additions made to the PHP engine. Less than 3% clicked on the "others" option.

The votes were pretty close, with "Functionality" only barely edging out "Performance Boost". "OO Functionality Changes", however, topped the list with points to spare.]]> Mon, 13 Mar 2006 07:41:50 -0600