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.

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.

Akash Mehta has posted a list of suggestions he has for developers wanting to move up and enhance their skills in the language:

So, you’re an up-and-coming PHP developer, you’re spending a lot of time learning new tricks and you’re always on the bleeding edge when it comes to using technologies in your web applications. What’s next?

His four answers to "what's next" are:

• Read books, write code.
• Attend conferences
• Take courses and qualification tests
• Watch the web

...with the final one being his most important.

On the PHP 10.0 Blog today, Stas has a suggestion that might help out developers that use the combination "dirname(__FILE__)" to get the working directory. He proposes something like __FILEDIR__ to replace it and to help make code cleaner.

The reason is simple - libraries want to include files relative to library top directory, and do not want to count on include path. And relative include resolution rules in PHP not clear to all, so people prefer to be sure. The downside here is that this expression is dynamic - executed at run-time. Meaning it's slower and less toolable and also makes a bad habit of putting dynamic things into include (which is not a problem here, since it’s "static dynamic" thing, but still a bad habit).

His suggestion has merit, and, according to the comments on the post, the reception seems like it would be positive.