Tobias Schlitt - a passion for php

My favorite weblogging software Serendipity was just released in version 1.0. Thanks a lot to Garvin Hicking and all other contrinbutors for their efforts to build that great piece of PHP software! Congratulations for becoming stable, S9Y! Btw., the new design of the website is really cool! :)

How "Dr. Scheme" is scared, when it's main window has been closed...

Beside the champagne throwing release of PHP 5.0, the version 4.3.8 has been released. It's strongly recommended to upgrade to this version, regarding security issues.

Sadly this does not implement GIF creation support. I know (very well) that GIF is not a great format, but there are still people out there who are forced (e.g. by management) to use pretty outdated browsers, which do not support PNG or (not so outdated browsers) which still do not support transparency in PNG.

The GD lib people heavily deny to integrate GIF support again, so the outlook for getting a PHP version which actually supports the creation of GIF seems nearly hopeless... :( Poor souls working under the stated conditions...

It finally happened! PHP5 has recently been released.

See the announcement here, the changelog here and download the final versions of PHP 5.0.0 here.

The key features of the new major version are:

• The Zend Engine II with a new object model and a huge bunch of new features.
• The new SimpleXML extension for easy manipulation of XML as PHP objects.
• Bundled SQLite support.
• The new MySQL extension (MySQLi) for MySQL 4.1 and later.
• A completly new XML support, utilizing libxml2 (see [here http://www.xmlsoft.org/]).
• A brand new, built-in SOAP extension.
• Greatly improved streams.

And a huge lot more!

P.S. The best: Development on PHP 5.1 can officially start now! ;)

Everyone using the Gallery software should urgently update their installation!

Thanks to Peter who sent me a screenshot where he had complete admin access to my gallery installation.

Since the configuration facilities of S9Y's wiki plugin are still very rudimentary I started reworking the plugin on my own. It's not really deeply tested, but the main features worked well, so I will start using it here tomorrow.

I reworked the following things:

• Updated the bundled Text_Wiki package to the actual PEAR version.
• Moved wiki rule config from the class to the plugin.
• Added support to switch on/off each wiki rule from the admin interface.
• Added further config options (like base path for images, target for URLs,...)
• Added support for real wiki page linking (through giving the plugin a flat file, which is cached, if it's remote).

Maybe someone likes it. You can get it here.

Yeah, finally I switched to Serendipity 0.6-pl1. And yeah, it's really cool.

This first entry is written using the most useful feature S9Y could get: Wiki markup! Supported by the PEAR+ class Text_Wiki by Paul M. Jones you can easily type your entries formating them using wiki markup language. :)

The only downer of the joy is that all past entries will be broken, if you switch to wiki markup... But a little hack can solve this easily. You can find the patch in the extended entry. And beware, if you turn the wiki markup plugin on for HTML nugget sidebar plugin, it will frag your HTML code!

The current version of the Text_Wiki class is rather old, but works fine, hopefully the S9Y guys will update this to a newer version with the next release. Beside that it would be very desirable to have the possibility to configure the rules loaded for Text_Wiki from within S9Y config, because e.g. for me the wikilinks rule (replacing WikiWords with their URL) is not that important, and the rule is not usable right now, without patching...

Another new feature I ever wanted to have is switching off those damn smiley images. Since I hate thos little "funny" images, that's a real easement. ;)

S9Y is cool. Especially 0.6-pl1. :)