The 2nd release candidate of 2.6.14 was just published; this release performs the final bit of cleanup, code rearrangement and unification to make usage of PDO as a database interface possible. As of this release it is now possible to install FUDforum with the following PDO drivers: MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite in addition to the native MySQL and PostgreSQL interfaces. Other important changes include fixes that accommodate the PHP 5.1 backwards compatibility (BC) breaks introduced after 5.1.0b1. Also, FUDforum no longer requires temporary tables, making their use optional, which should be welcome news to all the people who don't have the necessary privileges to perform this operation. The installer and upgrade script are now available online and can be downloaded from: http://fudforum.org/download.php The release also includes various minor fixes and improvements, listed below. Properly recognize permanent bans on ban list admin control panel. thread_view table is now forced to MyISAM for MySQL....

PHP 5.1 is well on its way towards release, so very little time is left to sneak in forgotten or missing features into it. One very handy (IMHO) feature that I've added to the PDO MySQL driver is the ability to toggle usage of buffered queries. Up until now any query executed would be unbuffered, which limited you to operation with just a single result cursor at a time. The only way to avoid this limitation was to use fetchALL() method to pre-fetch results into array and then use them. This however is not always possible or practical as I've found out in the progress of adding PDO support to FUDforum. So, what do you do when something is lacking in PHP? Write a patch of course! As of yesterday you can set PDO_MYSQL_ATTR_USE_BUFFERED_QUERY attribute to TRUE to enable buffered queries and FALSE to disable them. [php] $a = new PDO($dsn, $login, $passwd); $a->setAttribute(PDO_MYSQL_ATTR_USE_BUFFERED_QUERY, 1); $res = $a->query("SELECT ..."); $a->setAttribute(PDO_MYSQL_ATTR_USE_BUFFERED_QUERY, 0); foreach...

A new version of FUDforum is in the works, 2.6.14. This release is intended to introduce some new functionality as well as address any existing bugs. Some additional work has been done to enable future PDO support. At this time I already have a "beta" PDO driver that works with PostgreSQL, MySQL and partially supports SQLite. I hope to have it in CVS within a release or two. This version can be downloaded at: http://fudforum.org/download.php [b]New Features:[/b] Added Brazilian Portuguese translation. Allow resizing of the textarea for message posting. Added ability to set temporary bans. Added admin control panel to view all banned users. Improved performance of threaded topic view list rendering. Improved png hack for IE, it is now done by PHP. Better caption for template set on theme editor. Added unread message indicator for collapsed forums. Some changes to allow support of PDO database interface. Added view support to upgrade script. Improved message storage algorithm [b]...

Up until a few days there was no way to tell PHP from which IP address to submit requests when making connections on a multi-ip server. PHP would automatically pick the 1st external IP and use it deliver external data. To address this limitation, I've added a context option that allows to you to bind an IP from the available local IPs and use it, rather then the default to initiate the connection. [php] $conn = stream_context_create(array('socket'=>array('bindto' => "1.2.3.4:0"))); file_get_contents("http://url", NULL, $conn); [/php] The "socket" wrapper option "bindto" takes a ipv4 or ipv6 address as well as a port, binds the connection to it. Using the port is not necessary in most cases, if you simply wish to bind to a certain IP, specify it followed by ":0" as shown in the example.

Today is the eve of PHP's 10 anniversary, could anyone had guessed that what started as a little Perl script would evolve into a scripting languages powering millions of sites all over the globe. My 1st experience with PHP came around 1998, when the ISP I was using at the time was quite mortified by the load my Perl (CGI) scripts were causing on the server. Their suggestion was to switch to PHP, which supposedly offered performance and would help me not kill server, this was back in the day when PHP 3.0.X was king. As a programmer coming from a C background, PHP was a welcome break from Perl, a language seemingly designed for obfuscation. The thing that impressed me the most about PHP was the online manual, which rivaled many books in clarity and ease of use and a thriving community of users willing to share the knowledge about the language. It was another 2 years before I made my 1st contribution to PHP in a form of the shmop extension that provided quick & simple interface to shared memory for PHP....