I'd planned on diving into the Embedding Silverlight in PHP project, but what I found is that there have been some changes in Microsoft technologies since the release of that project that make it even easier to embed Silverlight in PHP applications. So I'll stick to the spirit of my promise if not to the letter of it.

He shows how to set up some storage (a blob) on the Windows Azure service as a place to keep the video you're going to stream. When you set it up you'll create a public service name and get an access key that you can use when accessing the videos. He includes an example of the upload process and how, based on the information for each video, you can use this project to pull video directly from this data store.

Perhaps one of the most frustrating aspects of using PHP with websites, is getting variables into CSS. Having variables stored in an ini file, config file or even a database can make the updating of the look and feel of a site simple, however, CSS files, by default, do not parse PHP. [...] A html file may also include a PHP file, in the same manner as it includes a CSS file. This means the stylesheet can be renamed from style.css to style.php.

Using this method, the PHP inside the file is parsed and, because its included with a link tag, the CSS is also made available to the rest of the page.

With symfony 1.0, one of the nice features was the freeze option, which allowed you to package the symfony libraries inside your project quite easily. This was very useful, for instance when deploying your project on a server where you couldn't install symfony. With symfony 1.1, it is apparently not advised anymore to use the freeze option (even though it is still available). So how should this be done then? Let's have a look...

He steps through the process, first setting up a subversion repository then putting a copy of symfony in to the lib/vendor directory and use the svn:externals to link to it.

In order to make embedding PHP truly simple for all of our developers we developed the PHPEmbed library which is just a more accessible and simplified API built on top of the PHP SAPI. The library is so useful, we decided to share it with the world. Check it out for yourself at http://developers.facebook.com/phpembed/

The library (currently in release 20070924) can be grabbed either directly from their download link or via the public svn repository they've set up. There's also some documentation and help for it in the form of a developer's group and the manual (PDF/HTML).

The exploit code slipped through the site's defenses with the aid of a legitimate image at the beginning of the file, according to a blog post on the Sans Institutes's Internet Storm Center. [...] Malicious attackers planted PHP coded exploit script within an image file. PHP is often used as a programming language to create dynamic Web sites.

The article reports that, while this exploit hasn't happened much, the occurrences of it's use are growing with victims in a wide range of classifications - from small personal sites out to a certain major image hosting site. This same issue was discussed here on the PHPClasses.org website as well.

The problem is that depending on the email client software that your recipient is using, he or she will most likely be given the option to suppress that return-receipt from being sent back to you. This renders the return-receipt system almost completely unreliable as a means of detecting when someone has read your email. If you have access to a web server that's running PHP, you can make your own return-receipt system that is (almost) guaranteed to work.

Their method is to embed an image into the email's content. This image is actually a linked image generated by PHP making it able to grab information about the view status of the email it's included in.

How PHP can be so popular is beyond me; the whole sense of encouraging all of your html, code, bindings, javascript, even sql (as in the below example) into a single file is a nightmare.

He Goes on to talk about his experience with JSP versus PHP and some perspectives on how PHP lacks features he's used to or how other developers he's talked to had similar issues.

One thing that concerns me (and apparently several others in the PHP community) is that he keeps talking about procedural PHP code that's an "all in one page" kind of setup. Well, of course this can get messy quickly - that's no way to code anything, much less PHP. Organization means more than just breaking code up into chunks on your page (though it's a very low-level start). Plus, the sample code he provides is a joke - a PHP developer with a few weeks of experience could push out something 10x better.

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

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

Herry also mentions some specific examples of cases that could use it, including Ilia's fudforum software, which makes use of it to perform its installation.