Robert Eisele has a new post (and some new source) on his blog today that has gotten the PHP community both up in arms and excited about the potential it offers - a fork of PHP that's been modified to include lots of little improvements for changes in performance, some new PHP functions, usability improvements and changes in the MySQLi/mysqlnd drivers.

It took me a while but here's a new toy. Today I publish my own PHP fork based on the PHP 5.3.6 code base with a few changes that make the everydays developer life more bearable. It includes some of the patches I've already published about 3 years ago, my defcon extension and also my infusion extension plus a good bunch of extra gimmickries.

Updates in his release available on github) include:

• Hardcoded constants
• Turn off $_REQUEST variable if it's not needed
• new methods like str_random, ob_fwrite, sigfig and strcal
• changes in foreach, strstr and binary number handling
• updates to MySQLi/mysqlnd to return matched rows and mysqi_return

The community reaction to this fork has been divided - some think the work put into these changes should have been submitted to the main PHP project instead and others see it as a good step forward for the language. Share your thoughts by commenting on the post.