On the CloudWays blog there's a new post with comments from several members of the PHP community about why they feel that managed cloud hosting is a better option when it comes to hosting their applications.

Not many people realize that their choice of hosting solution could determine the success or failure of their project. Even the best code base fails to perform to its maximum potential because of a hosting solution that fails to provide appropriate support.

[...] In order to understand why many industry leaders recommend managed cloud hosting for PHP projects, it is important to understand the benefits of these hosting solutions. In effect, managed cloud hosting offers three important benefits.

These three benefits involve the offloading of the usual hassles of server management, improved security and scalability. Members of the PHP community that contributed their opinions include:

• Anna Filina
• Adam Wathan
• Josh Lockhart
• Tessa Mero
• Matt Stauffer
• Manuel Lemos

Check out the full article to read their thoughts on why managed cloud hosting is the way forward.

The TutsPlus.com site has posted a new tutorial for the WordPress developers out there showing you how to get started with namespacing and autoloading in your WordPress installation.

Namespaces and autoloading are not topics that are usually discussed when it comes to working with WordPress plugins. Some of this has to do with the community that's around it, some of this has to do with the versions of PHP that WordPress supports, and some of it simply has to do with the fact that not many people are talking about it. And that's okay, to an extent.

Neither namespaces nor autoloading are topics that you absolutely need to use to create plugins. They can, however, provide a better way to organize and structure your code as well as cut down on the number of require, require_once, include, or include_once statements that your plugins use.

The article then starts in by listing the things you'll need to have installed and working to follow along. It then talks about what they're going to help you build - a simple plugin that adds an "Inspirational quotes" widget to your post editor page. They walk you through the basic setup of the plugin, adding the box to the page and setting up the "questions.txt" file to pull the quotes from. Code is provided for each step including the creation of the "quote reader" class and the class to display the meta box.

In this new post Matthew Setter has posted about one of the core concepts behind the structure and use of Zend Framework 2, its use of dependency injection to handy object relationships and access (via Zend/Di).

As Zend Framework 2 is well and truly here, before some of us who are new to it dive right on in, whether you’re completely new or, like me, migrating from Zend Framework 1, it’s really important to ensure that we understand the core concepts on which it’s based. [...] In this, the first part in the series, I’m going to go through what dependency injection (DI) is. However, as there are a number of great posts already available on the topic by some very experienced developers, [...] I’m not going to rehash them.

Instead he extracts out useful tips from posts of a few other sources on ZF2 and dependency injection in general: Matthew Weier O'Phinny, the ZF2 manual, Martin Fowler on dependency injection, Wikipedia and more. He also includes lots of links to more great articles on the subject, both ZF2-specific and for DI iin general.

All of you developers out there, NETTUTS.com has a question for you - are you making any of these ten PHP mistakes in your day to day development? Which ones, you ask? Read on...

Here are 10 PHP mistakes that any programmer, regardless of skill level, might make at any given time. Some of the mistakes are very basic, but trip up even the best PHP programmer. Other mistakes are hard to spot (even with strict error reporting). But all of these mistakes have one thing in common: They're easy to avoid.

Here's the list (as Glen Stanberry sees it):

• Single quotes, double quotes
• Semicolon after a While
• NOT Using database caching
• Missing Semicolon After a Break or a Continue
• Not Using E_ALL Reporting
• Not Setting Time Limits On PHP Scripts
• Not Protecting Session ID's
• Not Validating Cookie Data
• Not Escaping Entities
• Using Wrong Comparison Operators

One of the things that's been hanging around PHP's neck since its early days is the magic_quotes setting that was introduces to try to make things easier. In this interesting post Arpad Ray takes a look at this setting and why its a bad thing for PHP to have around.

Like register_globals, it helped lower the barrier of entry to building a dynamic website by removing some of the complexity. However it certainly wasn't without sacrifice, problems with the implementation quickly appeared and continued to abound for the next ten years. Finally in PHP 5.2.2 we got an implementation which (as far as its intentions went) seemed to be bug free, but of course by then it was turned off by default and was already slated to be dropped in PHP 6.

He looks at a few reasons they're bad (not good enough for escaping, inconsistent, performance issues) and some methods - code snippets - on how to deal with it being turned on on your server.

From an important notice posted on the main PHP.net page - a bug has been found with PHP 5.2.7 and it has been "recalled":

Due to a security bug found in the PHP 5.2.7 release, it has been removed from distribution. The bug affects configurations where magic_quotes_gpc is enabled, because it remains off even when set to on. In the meantime, use PHP 5.2.6 until PHP 5.2.8 is later released.

The 5.2.7 downloads have been removed from the downloads page but you can now redownload the PHP 5.2.6 source and binaries if you need them.

You can also find out more about the issue in this post on Stefan Esser's blog