Simon Willison’s Weblog

Zend PHP 5 Goodies

21st March 2004

Zend have quietly released a veritable treasure trove of PHP 5 tutorials via their PHP5 InfoCenter:

• XML in PHP 5—What’s New? by Christian Stocker
• PHP SOAP Extension by Dmitry Stogov
• SQLite Introduction by Ilia Alshanetsky
• Tidying up your HTML with PHP 5 by John Coggeshall
• Com_dotnet by Wez Furlong
• Using ext/mysqli: Part I—Overview and Prepared Statements by Zak Greant and Georg Richter

The Tidy functions look particularly useful, especially if you are interested in maintaining clean markup within your PHP applications.

One thing that I would like to see addressed with the full release of PHP 5 is the increasing fragmentation of the PHP manual. The single online manual now covers every version of PHP from 3 upwards, making it increasingly difficult to use effectively if you are targetting older versions of PHP. The Python site maintains archived versions of previous documentation snapshots, making it easy to refer to the documentation of the version of the language you are using. With the major changes between versions 4 and 5 of PHP a similar approach could be highly beneficial.