PHP

I was looking for variety in the CMS headlines to excerpt/post at my site, but everything is coming up Drupal this morning. Not such a bad thing if you like Drupal, is it?

What I hadn't expected was a discussion of Larry Garfield's benchmarking of PHP magic over at Jeff Moore's Professional PHP Blog. Garfield has been collecting some benchmarks in preparation for Drupal 7 development. Drupal 7 "will open up developers to PHP 5 functionality when it is released next year" and likely break Drupal's compatibility with PHP 4.

By golly, Joomla has been awarded as the Best PHP Open Soure CMS in Packt Publishing's 2007 awards.

Joomla! is today revealed as the Award's third category winner, claiming Best Open Source PHP Content Management System. Last year's overall winner came out on top ahead of Drupal in second and e107 in third place and receives $2,000.

Joomla! was selected as the winner in the Best PHP category due to "its good front-end for administrators and end-users, which gives users a simple and traditional company website straight out of the box".

If the project leaders and users of your favorite content management system are still debating when they should drop PHP 4 support, it looks like the PHP development team has helped make that decision for them.  PHP.net just announced the End of Life for PHP 4.  Starting in 2008, only security updates on a case-by-case basis will be provided...and PHP 4 is dead in August 2008.

Until this post by Nick Lewis, I've been in the camp with the folks that say PHP-based content management systems such as Drupal should be compatible with both PHP 4 and PHP 5.   After reading his post, I'm convinced he's correct that new development should be geared toward PHP 5.  It's hard to fight for the future when you continue to hold on to the past...

Should Drupal move to PHP 5?

In one word: absolutely.

In one sentence: if we don't, the drupal project will die along with PHP.

I'm in the middle of upgrading my VPS server from PHP 5.1.6 to PHP 5.2.1.  So if you don't hear from me anytime soon...you now have an explanation.

PHP 5.2.1 has been released and includes a number of stability and security enhancement of the 5.X branch. Besides the usual bug fixes (over 180 of them), PHP 5.2.1 also includes the following key improvements:

Philippe Archambault wrote to us that he is working on a PHP version of Radiant CMS. Radiant CMS is based on the Ruby language. Mr. Archambault has appropriately named his CMS, phpRadiant. If imitation is a sincere form of flattery, then lets hope the Radiant CMS folks are blushing!

Mr. Archambault isn't the first person to suggest taking what they liked in Radiant CMS and migrating it from the Ruby language to one that is PHP based. However, his project is the first one that I know about which has actually seen the light of day.

Over the weekend, I upgraded the server that hosts CMS Report with the latest stable releases of MySQL and eAccelerator. The upgrade from MySQL 4.1 to 5.0 was easy compared to the upgrade I made a year ago from MySQL 3.23 to 4.1. This time around I also have use of CPanel which meant I could make the database upgrade with at least one eye closed. My journey with upgrading from eAccelerator 0.9.4 to 0.9.5 however took a lot longer.

I've been using eAccelerator 0.9.4 since it was released early in 2006. I've gotten into some trouble in the past by those smarter than me when I tried to explain exactly what eAccelerator does and does not do. To play it safe this time around, I'll give you the summary of what eAccelerator does straight from eAccelerator.net:

The start of November is big news for users and developers of PHP applications with the release of PHP 5.2 on the 2nd of the month. According to the release announcement, this "release is a major improvement in the 5.X series, which includes a large number of new features, bug fixes and security enhancements".

Significant features of PHP 5.2 include:

• New memory manager for the Zend Engine with improved performance and a more accurate memory usage tracking.
• Input filtering extension was added and enabled by default.
• JSON extension was added and enabled by default.
• ZIP extension for creating and editing zip files was introduced.
• Hooks for tracking file upload progress were introduced.
• Introduced E_RECOVERABLE_ERROR error mode.
• Introduced DateTime and DateTimeZone objects with methods to manipulate date/time information.
• Upgraded bundled SQLite, PCRE libraries.
• Upgraded OpenSSL, MySQL and PostgreSQL client libraries for Windows installations.
• Many performance improvements.
• Over 200 bug fixes.

InfoWorld has a very good article centering around this week's Zend/PHP Conference & Expo. In their article, "PHP event: Open source accommodation stressed" a few good opening lines to use as a teaser for the article:

Rather than fighting the open source wave, commercial IT vendors do what they must: try to ride that wave...

..."It seems to us from where we sit that there's really no choice," said Tim Bray, a Web-oriented generalist at Sun and a co-inventor of XML. "A substantial portion of the market has made it clear with their wallets that they want to deploy and run open source software."

"We can't go back. It's too late," Bray said.