Sometimes the most crucial, basic piece of information can seem so hard to find. For example, suppose you wanted to find out what version of PHP your remote webhost provides to shared hosting users? What would you do? [...] For development purposes it can be helpful having phpinfo() available, but on a live shared host, you may discover as I did recently that it is no longer available; your host may have disabled it.

She includes three other ways you can use to get the version of PHP you're working with:

• If you have command line access, running "php -v"
• Using the phpversion function (or PHP_VERSION constant)
• Appending a certain value to the URL (only works in some cases)

Someone recently posed the question: "How can I find out when a particular version of PHP was released?" I pointed him to CVS main/php_version.h, then went about taking my own medicine. Here's what I got from a quick scan of the cvs log for that oft-touched file in case anyone else gets curious...

The list (of 48 items) shows a few fun things she points out - PHP's 7th birthday is coming up next month (May 2007), the file was usually tagged before the actual release date, and version 4.0.4's info points to an invalid file so its date is a guess at best.