i.justrealized

Probably about time:

PHP 4 and MySQL 4 End of Life Announcement

First up, the announcement that developers really care about. WordPress 3.1, due in late 2010, will be the last version of WordPress to support PHP 4.

For WordPress 3.2, due in the first half of 2011, we will be raising the minimum required PHP version to 5.2. Why 5.2? Because that’s what the vast majority of WordPress users are using, and it offers substantial improvements over earlier PHP 5 releases. It is also the minimum PHP version that the Drupal and Joomla projects will be supporting in their next versions, both due out this year.

Finally!

On GitHub. Will definitely be giving it a try when I’m free, probably not this month. No one can say no to faster.

As possibly the only NetBeans users coding in PHP in Singapore, I would like to announce in a somewhat lonely fashion that NetBeans 6.8 has been released. Despite being ridiculed for the past two years [insert laughter] for my unusual support for coding PHP with NetBeans IDE, I can never get used to something other than NetBeans so there’s probably something NetBeans did right after all.

If you’re on NetBeans 6.7, I urge you to upgrade. If you aren’t a NetBeans user, do give NetBeans a chance. It’s (probably) slower and Java-ish but the excellent code completion support more than made up for it. Oh yeah, and it’s free too.

Try NetBeans 6.8.

I’ve been busy this couple of weeks hence the lack of updates. I have been working mainly on my tool of choice — CakePHP. I mainly do my work on OS X for PHP. Recently I got involved in working for some software that requires Microsoft SQL Server, PHP and IIS. The whole shift towards the other side slowed me down a lot. I found myself being confused over the tiniest thing like where’s my host file. Where’s the php.ini? How to configure this and that. The terms are seemingly different and watching IIS crash again and again due to me incorrect configurations frustrates me.

On the brighter note, when I working in Windows I actually realized how much I missed Windows Explorer. It’s probably the single most useful utility I miss when I switch to a MacBook.

I just upgraded all the software only to discover PHP got upgraded to 5.3. That’s fast, PHP 5.3 isn’t out too long ago and it’s in the Macosforge repository. Even the CakePHP 1.2.4.8284 update released on August 9 did not include PHP 5.3 compatibility.

Perhaps it’s time to update the CakePHP requirements and be indicative of the lack of support for PHP 5.3.

Now the library is throwing deprecated notices all around “Assigning the return value of new by reference is deprecated in…”. Also there is a PHP warning:

To stop the deprecated notices, I had to modify Cake’s core, not something I like to do.

I added the line “error_reporting (E_ALL & ~E_DEPRECATED);” at the top of /cake/libs/object.php. I also updated /cake/libs/configure.php by changing “error_reporting(E_ALL);” to “error_reporting (E_ALL & ~E_DEPRECATED);”.

This doesn’t solve the problem exactly, it just suppresses the deprecation notices so I can continue working. For a PHP 5.3 compatible CakePHP, you’ll need to use CakePHP 1.3 which currently isn’t stable. I’ll definitely be trying it soon but in the meantime I’ll just have to suppress error reporting.

Update: jdbartlett commented on a better way:

If you’re not doing any debugging, you can add the above code to the top of /app/webroot/index.php and suppress the error messages without editing the core.

Thanks jdbartlett! You saved me time.

The easiest way to start developing in PHP is to get XAMPP, the whole package can even be placed in a flash drive. Using the free AOL Mail account also allows you to sign in to the SMTP server without TLS which allows XAMPP sendmail to work.

0. Objective

To get your PHP scripts to send an email out. This guide assumes you have XAMPP or XAMPP Lite. My environment is Windows Vista. (I use XAMPP Lite by the way.)

My XAMPP is placed in C:\xampplite\, so your configuration may be a little different. The files to be modified are sendmail.ini and php.ini. (more…)

I’ve been waiting and waiting. Can’t wait to try the new NetBeans 6.7 Beta. Now I use NetBeans exclusively for PHP. I used to still have a copy of Eclipse hidden somewhere now I don’t use Eclipse anymore.