New to the A/R/T article repository from php|architect today is this look at the "Top Five PHP Mistakes" from Marco Tabini.

These topics have been beaten to death, and will likely continue to be beaten well after their bones have turned to dust. However, I have never had the opportunity to explore some aspects of PHP that obviously are mistakes-not just to understand their origin, but to analyze their impact on PHP and the way they have been dealt with.

His list of mistakes is:

• Objects in PHP 4
• Function Naming Consistency
• Safe Mode and Magic Quotes
• Register Globals
• Lack of Unicode Support

Under each he explains them, noting why they are important enough to mention is the list. He does, however, end on a bit lighter note - the PHP, for all its problems and woes, is just like any other laugnage out there. It has its problems, but its learned from them and, as Marco puts it "has grown because of them".

New to the A/R/T article repository from php|architect today is this look at the "Top Five PHP Mistakes" from Marco Tabini.

These topics have been beaten to death, and will likely continue to be beaten well after their bones have turned to dust. However, I have never had the opportunity to explore some aspects of PHP that obviously are mistakes-not just to understand their origin, but to analyze their impact on PHP and the way they have been dealt with.

His list of mistakes is:

• Objects in PHP 4
• Function Naming Consistency
• Safe Mode and Magic Quotes
• Register Globals
• Lack of Unicode Support

Under each he explains them, noting why they are important enough to mention is the list. He does, however, end on a bit lighter note - the PHP, for all its problems and woes, is just like any other laugnage out there. It has its problems, but its learned from them and, as Marco puts it "has grown because of them".

In this new post from Vidyut Luther on PHPCult.com, he mentions some difficulties he had installing some new PHP software - caused by bad habits the programmers used that caused trouble down the line. To help prevent further abuses of these issues, he lists out some of them.

His list so far is:

• Turning "register globals" on
• using shot open tags
• using the ASP style of tagging
• single-line condition statements (without the curly braces)
• improper use of exit()
• assuming settings on a remote server

For each of the above options, he briefly covers his opinion as to why they're wrong and can cause some serious headaches down the line. Most advanced programmers out there know about most of these issues, and have learned to work without them.

In this new post from Vidyut Luther on PHPCult.com, he mentions some difficulties he had installing some new PHP software - caused by bad habits the programmers used that caused trouble down the line. To help prevent further abuses of these issues, he lists out some of them.

His list so far is:

• Turning "register globals" on
• using shot open tags
• using the ASP style of tagging
• single-line condition statements (without the curly braces)
• improper use of exit()
• assuming settings on a remote server

For each of the above options, he briefly covers his opinion as to why they're wrong and can cause some serious headaches down the line. Most advanced programmers out there know about most of these issues, and have learned to work without them.

In this post on the Sitepoint PHP Blog, Harry Fuecks makes a quick mention of another blog post dealing with the enhancements in PHP6 and another handy feature he noticed as well.

Pierre-Alain Joye picked this one up last week, and it needs repeating. For PHP6 the following are already gone from CVS: Register globals, Magic quotes, Safe mode.

As blogged a while back, you'll find these changes discussed here. Nice use of carrot and stick in fact - for the pain on fixing your apps to run under PHP6, you get Unicode.

The other feature he's noticed pertains to the php.ini settings file that PHP uses:

Just noticed a new ini setting here: "allow_url_include - PHP_INI_SYSTEM Available since PHP 6.0.0." Excellent! That eliminates another major source of exploits (perhaps the biggest) have moaned about that before here and here.