It's been a long road and exactly five years (35 releases) since the much discussed and highly controversial PHP directive register_globals has been disabled by default in PHP. After sifting through the mailing list archives, the following set of information has been compiled. Feel free to make additions, corrections, and report register_globals memories!

His list includes some recent "tidbits" about the directive (including the fact that there's still lots of code in the PHP CVS repository that requires register_globals to be on). Following that, there's his brief timeline of the directive's progression - from its infancy as gpc_globals all the way up to more recent events - like its removal from the PHP 6 HEAD CVS versions. With the release of this next major version of PHP, "the beast" can finally be laid to rest.

Just for fun, I'd like to share a couple of quick PHP tidbits with you that I wrote instead of starting on the real project at hand.

This post is the first of them, demonstrating two things . The first of which how you can make a useful tool with the SimpleXML functionality of PHP 5 and a REST API (like his example from Feedburner). His example grabs the statistics from the Feedburner API and pulls out the circulation number with two lines of code.

The second bit of functionality he shares is a quick function for shortening URLs to make them a bit easier to manage. It insets the ellipsis into the middle of the long URL to make it easier to squeeze into that layout.

One of the great things about OSCON is how it brings people together, and this year's conference was no different. I had the privilege of meeting a number of people for the first time.

People on his list include Cal Evans, Andrew van der Stock, Kevin Yank, Jeremy Johnstone, and Ed Finkler. He also mentions a "cool idea" from Zak Greant - the use of a bug/issue tracker to deal with community issues.

Chris also briefly mentions the "PHP trading card game", the PHP Security Hoedown, and the OmniIT book signing.