Ilia Alshanetsky, release manager of PHP 5.1, has published the first release candidate of the upcoming 5.1.3 version of PHP. It's mainly a bug fix release, but the PCRE library was updated to version 6.6 and the CGI interface has been updated quite a bit as well. Other items improved included updates to the SPL, Reflection APU, cURL support and the GD functionality. The SimpleXML engine was also updated to allow for the use of namespaces with the addChild and addAttribute functions.

You can grab this latest release candidate from Ilia's site and you can check out the Changelog here.]]> Mon, 13 Mar 2006 07:19:59 -0600 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4922 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4922 Ligaya Turmelle in this blog post today, it seems that safe_mode in PHP is officially "gone".

From this Zend Weekly Summary:

Following the Paris PDM recommendations, and (unusually) with the approval of the entire spectrum of PHP developers and users, Andi went to work on removing safe_mode from CVS HEAD this week. He got as far as the streams code before he hit a problem, and wrote to Sara (for help).

Sara agreed that it was in fact a bug, and admitted that she'd probably introduced this 'slight logic twist' when routing unlink() to use stream wrappers.

Andi thanked Sara for her analysis and asked her to keep an eye on his commits to ensure he didn't apply a wrong fix in the stream wrapper code. She did; he didn't. Andi went on to clean all trace of the safe_mode implementation from the rest of the PHP core and most of the core extensions, ably assisted by Ilia.

One of the longest-lingering, painful issues that PHP has had to deal with in the past has finally been laid to rest. Here's to a positive step forward to PHP6!]]> Thu, 02 Mar 2006 06:31:55 -0600 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4750 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4750 Ilia Alshanetsky has a quick note about his proposal for php|tek being approved and some of his thoughts on the upcoming conference.

On the conference's agenda I have just two items this time; I will be giving an introductory talk on PDO that should be of interest to anyone writing new PHP applications that utilize databases. The other item is a seminar on PHP Security, which will cover web security topics from the ground up, with the focus on web applications designed in PHP.

Aside from my own talks, Marco has collected an impressive array of speakers with notables such as Rasmus, Marcus, Derick, John, Sara (who I've never met in real life) and many others. So if you need to get away from the day to day drudgery and learn something about PHP in the process, this a conference you don't want to miss!

If you want to take advantage of the Early Bird pricing on the conference, you don't have much time left - it ends January 31st and is a discount of about $100 USD off of the regular price. For complete information and the list of presentations, you can get it all at their site...]]> Mon, 30 Jan 2006 07:14:43 -0600