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TotalPHP: Using a global configuration fileToday

The TotalPHP site is recommending something that can make your development (and maintenance) life much easier in the long run - using a global configuration file through out your app.

t's one of the basics of PHP and if you read any kind of tutorial or book on the subject it's one of the first things they cover, yet I still see people no using a global 'configuration' or 'include' file. It's one of the easiest things to do and will make your life so much easier! This 'configuration' file will include anything that needs to be run on every page of the website.

They suggest that using this configuration file everywhere (including it over the entire site) can make things easier in the long run. The idea is not without problems, though. It only works until you need something custom for a certain area or page - then you have to hack it to evaluate conditions. For most simple uses, though, its a good way to share information (like database connection details) through out the application.

Lukas Smith's Blog: PHP 5.3.0alpha3 is finally outToday

As Lukas Smith mentions, the latest alpha release for the PHP 5.3 series has been released - PHP 5.3alpha2.

Wow, after what feels like ages PHP 5.3.0alpha3 was just released. Originally we hoped to be able to release now intermediate releases every 2-3 weeks, this one took a good 2 months. Somehow this releases did its very best to stall itself. People that needed to work on things together by chance ended up being busy with other things and vacations in just the right order to make things impossible. Most of this was to be attributed to the namespace discussions, which climaxed in the

backslash FUD campaign.

He notes that a stable release is probably looking good in Q1 of 2009 (with namespaces being the delaying factor). He also suggests something that could help make things a bit simpler in the future - making the internals@ mailing list read-only for anyone outside of core developers. A good bit of the confusion and bickering came from those outside the dev team and it didn't help the group come to a decision any earlier.

You can find the official release information for the alpha2 on the main PHP.net website.

Community News: PHP 5.2.7 ReleasedToday

The latest version in the PHP 5.2.x series has been released today - PHP 5.2.7:

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of

PHP 5.2.7. This release focuses on improving the stability ofthe PHP 5.2.x branch with over 120 bug fixes, several of which are security related. All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to this release.

These security updates include an update of the PCRE version, fixing an incorrect order with php_value, correcting a possible overflow in memnstr and more. Check out the full Changelog for more information on these updates and improvements. You can download this latest update from the PHP.net website (or your favorite mirror).

Chris Jones' Blog: Which OCI8 DLL to use in PHP 5.3Today

With the release of another DLL driver for PHP on Windows to access Oracle databases, Chris Jones wanted to alleviate any confusion there might be between the two in a new blog post.

As I foreshadowed in a now distant post, Pierre has installed Oracle 11g Instant Client on the PHP Windows build box and updated the OCI8 build scripts for PHP 5.3 (and PHP 6). PHP 5.3 now has two mutually exclusive versions of the OCI8 extension DLL [...] The two DLLs have the same user script API that do the same thing. You only need to (and only can) enable one at any one time. Choose the one that matches your Oracle client libraries.

The two DLLs - php_oci8.dll and php_oci8_11h.dll - have pretty self-explanitory names, but it could be confusing as to whether you need both or not if you go the 11g route.

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