In a new post today Johannes Schluter talks about the upcoming version of PHP and three of the things it features: no more short tags, no more magic quotes and the dropping of the enable-zend-multibyte compile option.

I was writing about PHP.next before, many things improved there meanwhile. Most notably we have a committed version number: The next PHP release will be called PHP 5.4. The topic I want to talk about today is "Improved application portability" which covers multiple small changes which aim at making it simpler for developers to write applications working on any PHP setup.

The first two will be immediately familiar to any PHP developer, but the third might be a little more elusive. This option was used to compile in multi-byte encodings to use for data in an application. Unfortunately a good implementation (that didn't use mbstring) couldn't be found, so they're removing the feature.