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.

Matthew Turland notes that the second part of his "IRC Bots in PHP" series of articles has been posted to the C7Y community site (from php|architect).

The precursor to this article introduced some background and an overview of the design for the Phergie project as an example of the concepts involved in a PHP IRC bot implementation. This article will go further into the topic of plugins including descriptions of those that are commonly needed to make a bot fully functional as well as the commonly needed core features to support plugin development.

In part one he set up some of the foundation code and explained some of the thought behind the structure of the bot. In this part he gets more into the heart of the bot, showing how to define functions for common IRC actions (join/part/ping/etc) and how he made a plugin system to handle custom actions. He also mentions topics like memory usage, data storage methods and some of the "niceties" he included.

The Symfony project is recommending you upgrade your plugins to the latest editions - an issue with the PEAR channel caused it to load the wrong ones:

A problem in the symfony project PEAR channel made the plugin-install task always install the oldest version of the plugins, instead of the latest. If you recently installed plugins with the symfony command line, you probably installed an outdated version. Plugins installed via SVN are not affected.

You'll need to run a plugin-upgrade command for each of the plugins installed on your system to ensure that you're completely up to date. The post has complete info on how to tell which plugins you have and the exact commands to issue to being them up to date.

Matthew Turland has been working on a project based on an idea he and Ben Ramsey thought up - a wrapper around the libircclient libraries to make IRC interface simple. As a result, Matthew turned it into a more practical application - you can call her Phergie.

I had toyed with some previous iterations of Phergie, some Python-based and later some PHP-based, before I finally got an API design I was happy with.

The source for the bot can be downloaded from its subversion repository and you can find out more about it on its Trac site. Also, if you feel like chatting about it, you can head over to the #phergie channel on the Freenode IRC network.

On the ProDevTips blog today, Henrik has posted about an alternative to the popular Akismet plugin for the PHP blogging tool, WordPress, to help prevent even more comment spam from making it past - WP_Hashcash.

WP Hashcash is an antispam plugin that eradicates comment spam on Wordpress blogs. It works because your visitors must use obfuscated javascript to submit a proof-of-work that indicates they opened your website in a web browser, not a robot.

He includes the code that he needed to change to get the widget part of the plugin up and working correctly. You can find out more about this plugin from its page on Elliot Back's blog.

On the {H{Riot.com site today, there's a new tutorial talking about how to customize your site's Smarty templates a bit more using external plug-ins, specifically one for making those "code block" sections seen all over the web.

We will first learn how block plug-ins can be used in your templates, and then learn how to create our own. Once we know how to create a block plug-in, we will cover a practical example that will show you how block plug-ins can effectively be used in your own web sites.

The tutorial assumes that you already have Smarty installed and that you're familiar enough with it to know how to work with the plug-in system right away. They include some samples of how it can be used (a default block, formatting it with HTML) and, of course, how to integrate this (PHP code and all) into your template and push your content into it.