On the ThinkPHP blog today, there's a new post from Stephanie Ehrling about simulating an LDAP connection and data request to PHP with LDIF.

An LDIF file is a simple text file that can contain those LDAP information, which can be separated into two groups. On the one hand, it can hold exported LDAP data in a text format. The other purpose of LDIF is to use it for importing data into an LDAP based system. So it can contain data to be imported or just commands that shall be processed. This is an important fact, because that opens the door to an interesting workaround.

This workaround allows you to import large amounts of data quickly and easy by dumping it into the server via a simple PHP script. The code is included in the post, but you'll need to have the binaries to get the LDIF and LDAP functionality working together.

Ilia Alshanetsky has posted a quick note about building PHP with cURL/HTTP support combined with adding a MySQL extension. Conflicts can happen with some of the libraries, and he knows how to solve it.

The MySQL binaries found on mysql.com are built against yaSSL as opposed to the more common openssl against which libcurl (usede by cURL and HTTP extensions) is linked. The conflict between the two libraries causes curl initialization of the SSL layer to fail preventing startup of the PHP extensions.

The fix? To either use the older mysqlclient libraries or manually compile MySQL yourself against the OpenSSL libraries.

In this quick note from DynamicWebPages today, there's information about the posting of the latest release candidate for the PHP 5.1.3 series by Ilia - PHP 5.1.3RC2.

This is the last release candidate before the final version is (planned to be) released this coming Thursday, April 6th. Any and all help is appreciated in testing this release, so take a quick trip to Ilia's page to grab the source, and for those on Windows, the latest binaries.