The International PHP Magazine has conducted a poll on its website over the past week, this time asking "You Did Not Know That...", asking developers which of the true statements about PHP they didn't know about.

The options this time were:

• The trailing '?>' in PHP is Optional
• You can embed other programming languages in PHP
• Objects can be made to look like arrays by using Standard PHP Library
• require is faster than require_once
• Anything Less than 5.1.0 is Silly
• All

There wasn't a whole lot of difference in the results of this poll, but the most all-inclusive of the list was the one selected the most - "All". Following that, was that the trailing closing PHP tag is optional, then a tie for third between the "embed other languages" and "Less than PHP 5.1.0" options.

Be sure to cast your vote in their latest poll that asks readers that they're really looking for in their frameworks.

WeberDev.com has posted part three of their "User Authentication With patUser" series today, detailing some of the aditional functionality the patUser package has to offer.

While the API for user and group management does form the core of the patUser library, it's not all there is on display. patUser also includes a number of utility functions that can come in handy for certain specialized tasks.

These functions include identifying users and groups by different criteria (such as name or email address); keeping track of the URLs visited by the user so as to generate a user trail; maintaining user account statistics for auditing purposes; and providing exception-handling routines for more graceful error handling.

They give the details on how to:

• make exceptions,
• track the user's history through the site,
• perform a natural selection search on user data,
• how to identify users,
• record stats about the user's activities

With this tutorial they finish off the series, providing a good solid overview of the patUser package. If you're just now reading the series, be sure to check out part one and part two.

On WebProNews.com a PHP roadmap has been posted - a comprehensive look at what PHP is and how it's evolved.

We expect our readers to have a more than firm handle on what PHP is, but for completeness-sake: PHP (a recursive acronym of PHP: Hypertext Pre-processor) is an open source, server-side web-scripting language for creating dynamic pages.

They look first at what PHP has to offer, then how it's evolved, and finally a comparison of PHP to several other langauges, including Perl, Java, and Cold Fusion.

In this latest post from the Professional PHP Blog, there's a brief compaison of PHP versus other languages on a few different points.

Chris Shiflett posted some thoughts on PHP and Ruby on Rails which has generated some interesting discussion. Chris divides programming languages into two categories: Flexible and powerful, Structured and organized.

I prefer to group languages in a different way.

Among the topics to compare the languages under, included are things like garbage collection, interactive or batch, and abstraction. For each, he breaks the category down, describing what it's all about and seperates it into its two components, assigning langauges.