Matthew Turland is looking to "save you some grief" by pointing out an issue he recently had trouble with and eventually found out was a bug in PHP.

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.

In this DevX tutorial, Octavia Anghel shows how use PHP to create images based on the SVG libraries available to any browser.

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.

Cal Evans came up against a problem earlier in his development work - issues when he was trying to get his old include path.

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.

Rob Allen has posted about more updates that have been made to his Zend Framework tutorial zip file - one now contains a copy of the framework, the other doesn't.

This time, I've created two files: one with the Zend Framework (1.0.1) included and one without. The one without is much smaller at only 9KB, where as with the Framework, the zip is 2.2MB.

You can download the version with just the tutorial or with the combination directly from his websites. The tutorial has also been bumped up a version (to 1.4.4) with a few updates.