New this moring from Zend there is a look back at this past week in PHP history with their latest PHP Weekly Summary.

This past week was full of new features and discussions about function ideas/changes as well as talk of PHP benchmarking and some small issues with the Windows binary downloads. One interesting note talks about SimpleXML and an enhancement to it's code that will allow improvements in XPath like : Automatically registering any namespace prefixes used in the document, registering any prefixes manually added from calls registerNS(), and letting you refer to Qualified Names using the standard Prefix:LocalPart syntax. Definitely a step in the right direction for this already powerful package.

Another large item of note is the introduction of the E_STRICT error level that has been introduced into PHP5. There are several cases where this will show (if enabled) including: not using is_a but using instanceof, incorrect usage of references, when objects are passed to functions intended for arrays, and using a deprecated function or syntax.