For those of you that are comfortable with Composer, I wanted to talk about a few lesser-known, but really fantastic features. These are inspired by real questions I've heard while running around the country doing my one-man composer-and-dancing show (i.e. conference talks).

He shares four of them with a fifth that's more of an "upcoming feature" than a current one:

• Autoloading & Performance: "I thought class maps were the fastest?"
• Running Post-Deploy Scripts
• "What if I need to fork a library?"
• Can I host private packages on Packagist?
• What about signing the authenticity of Packages?

That last one about package signing is still on the known issues list and is under discussion, but no doubt that future versions of the tool will support it.

Over the last week, PerlCoders and PHP Labs have merged to offer even more professional scripts to their clients. To celebrate this merger, they are now offering a one-time special promotion for webmasters, which can save them over $300. As a small incentive for new members, PHP Labs is also offering free installation for the first script of your choice.

The press release goes on to talk about what each is bringing to the table and what they're offering from now on. The $300 promotion goes towards a membership for the site, giving you access to all 44 scripts without paying extra. Examples of the scripts include GalleryMaker, ProxyCheck, FileMailer, and CashMail. You can get more information from the promotion's page on their website.

Looking to get every ounce of performance from your Web server? If you're using PHP scripts, you can easily accomplish this using PHP's APC module, which caches php opcode instead of forcing php to reinterpret every script every time it is executed.

The install is simple (on PHP5) and they show some configuration options you can use to fine-tune the performance of the module to fit your needs. There's also a brief look at what the module actually does to the scripts as they get interpreted and passed out of PHP and into the web server.

With the current surge in "hackings" (or rather: script kiddies exploiting known holes to deface websites that don't support their view on the war) I've been going through a lot of scripts to find common and easy to fix vulnerabilities. With my fingers crossed, and perhaps a naive hope that people don't release scripts with massive holes anymore, I've been sorely disappointed.

They list out a few different things to watch out for, including potential SQL injection points and the unchecked inclusion of files via include(). It's some pretty basic stuff, so don't expect much new from the post, but it's a good reminder of some of the simple things we all, as developers, need to watch out for.

The links are:

• a URL shortening service
• One-click hosting service
• the creation of your own Amazon Bookstore
• an image hosting service
• the Million Pixel Page script

For each, there's a brief description given, as well as the link.