If you're a WordPress user and are in the process of an upgrade from PHP4 to PHP5, you might be having a few issues. One problem can be cause by the wp-cache component and this recent post from Shantanu Goel.

The issues range from weird page layouts, to some controls not working, to some errors popping up here and there, and probably your blog not even displaying. This occurs because even though WordPress is PHP5 compatible, some of the plugins you are using might not be.

In his case, it was the wp-cache plugin that was causing the problems. Permissions weren't right to allow it to do its job. This resulted in problems rendering content and with the site acting as it normally would. His solution involved disabling and reenabling the plugin after deleting the cache and lock file the plugin uses.

Damien Seguy has posted the PHP statistics for this month - the results from February 2008 - here's some of the highlights:

• PHP 5 set record of growth : + 2,5%, up to 32%
• PHP 5.2 is the second most popular version, ahead of 4.3.
• PHP 4.4.8's popularity is falling

You can check out the numbers yourself for the month as well as the evolution stats showing how things are progressing. He's also added a new graph this month showing the adoption rate that PHP5 is having in the online world.

In a new blog entry Philip Olson takes a look back at the "brief history" of the PHP logo and how its evolved over the years the language has been around.

PHP 4.0.0 added main/logo.h which contains the logos themselves (as text (a bunch of numbers (magic))) so I checked out every version of this file from CVS, parsed them to create the images, sorted by version/size, then wrote this blog post.

When the language started out there wasn't much in the way of a logo until PHP3 came around. Philip shows some of these early prototypes (most of which look nothing like the familiar purple oval of today). Things evolved with PHP4 and jokes were even played with the area inside the shape - everything from developers and dogs to bunnies showed up at different times of year or with special URLs.

The Slackware linux development group has released a new package for PHP4-using users of their distribution today:

New php-4.4.8 packages are available for Slackware 10.2 and 11.0 to fix security issues. More details about the issues may be found here: http://bugs.php.net/43010.

You can download it from their FTP sites, two versions for each of the most recent distributions: Slackware 10.2 and Slackware 11.0

Damien Seguy has posted this month's (well, January 2008's) PHP statistics to the Nexen.net website. Highlights from this edition include:

• PHP 5 displays strong growth, almost at 30%
• PHP 5.2 will be more popular than PHP 4.3 before April
• PHP 5.2.5 is already the dominating version of PHP 5
• PHP 4.4.8 not so popular

You can get the full details on this month's statistics from the full list of the statistics and the evolution posted on Nexen.

Finishing off their series on destructors in PHP5 applications today, DevShed has posted this new tutorial showing how to manually run the destructors of your class (in case there's ever a need).

In this final tutorial of the series I'm going to show you how to manually trigger a destructor, and in addition you'll learn how to emulate the behavior of this magic method when using PHP 4.

They not only talk about how to call the destructor manually but they also show how to call multiple destructors at the same time to destroy lots of objects at once. And, as promised, they include a method for being able to use a destructor-like bit of functionality in a PHP4 app as well.

In this post to the Developer Tutorials blog, Akash Mehta talks about the "version dilemma" that developers face when looking for good hosting - with all of the push towards PHP5 these days, why is it that so many hosting environments are still running on PHP4?

If you purchase a cheap hosting account with many of the major web hosts around today, chances are they will be running PHP 4. The problem for web hosts is this: the PHP community may have moved on from version 4, but a lot of the code out there hasn't.

He recommends one solution that several hosting providers are starting to gravitate towards - offering both to their customers and allowing them to switch between them (via something like cPanel).

The Open SUSE group has released an update for a list of their software to bring their PHP4 and PHP5 packages up to date.

php5 was updated to version 5.2.5 to fix several security vulnerabilities. For php4 on SLES9 the patches were backported.

You can find out more about the issues corrected as well as links to the packages that have been updated in the advisory message.

Damien Seguy has submitted this month's update to the Nexen.net PHP statistics for the month of December 2007:

PHP adoption statistics for December 2007 are released. Here are the monthly highlights:

• PHP 5 is now running on 27.8% of the servers
• PHP 5.2 usage will pass PHP 4.3 by April
• PHP 5.2.5 is 8.7% of the PHP 5 market

You can get more information on this month's stats over on the Nexen.net website - the evolution stats and the full stats for December 2007.