It's one of the gems in PHP that I find to be relatively under used. It's common for PHP applications to break out classes into their own files. This becomes cumbersome when working on large projects as you wind up with numerous include/require calls for any given page.

He shows an example of its usage (loading class files dynamically from a specified directory) and mentions how it can help to make your code a lot less ugly. Comments on the post range in topics - from comparing it to include paths, how the idea was borrowed from PEAR, and how proper naming conventions can make its use even easier.

It's pretty rare that I encounter a bug in the software I run that hampers my ability to work or my server environment's ability to function normally. However, I encountered one last week that has taken me and several Rackspace support technicians nearly a week to figure out, namely PHP bug #43677.

The issue was that PHP seemed to be "forgetting" the include_path in the current script (not Apache). The bug has been found in PHP 5.2.5 (and possible in all of the 5.2.x releases as well). The problem has been fixed in the latest CVS version and a patch has been created for those that want to correct the problem right away.

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is an XML specification for producing vector-based graphic content that you can create, modify, and manipulate dynamically from programming languages. Here, you'll explore the most important techniques and libraries for integrating SVG with PHP to create diverse graphic contentâ€"from simple shapes to complex graphs.

They show a few different ways to get the job done including a straight 'echo' call with the output, sending a converted SVG document over with a PHP header or including another (or multiple) SVG documents into another and outputting them. They also talk about tools like the phpHtmlLib library, the PEAR::XML_SVG package and the PEAR::Image_Canvas package.

What you SHOULD get back is a string describing your old include path. If you get false, you have hit the problem I hit last night. I went so far as to recompile 2 difference versions of Apache thinking (almost correctly) that it was something that had changed in my Apache config files.

If you're one of the "falsers" out there, check out the rest of his post of his solution around the problem. His problem stemmed from his trying to reassign a php_admin_value (instead of php_value where the script could override it) setting, specifically the one for the include_path.

He also points out that Zend Framework users might keep an eye out for this problem too as the Zend_Loader package changes the include path at times.