I just completed the upgrade to Wordpress version 2.5.1. (Wordpress is the application which runs this blog.) It was a relatively painless process, and as it includes an important security fix, I recommend anyone else out there using Wordpress perform the upgrade as soon as possible.
So far everything appears to be working fine, and hopefully it will have no effect on my readers (if there are any).
I recently saw a question posted in a forum about obtaining the most-used words in a file for the purpose of populating the content of a "keywords" meta tag. It got me thinking about how I would do it. I knew I could use the str_word_count() function to count words, but running that against any typical [X]HTML file would give a lot of junk you would not want in your keyword list.
One obvious step was to use the strip_tags() function as a means to only look at actual content and not grab tag and property names. A bit more involved was how to avoid common words. Then it occurred to me that MySQL's full text search mechanism utilizes a list of "stopwords" to ignore in its matching process. Luckily enough, I found the default list of stopwords in their online manual, so I copied that into a text file, ran a few search/replace operations on it to get it into one word per line, did a little massaging, and then I had stopword list ready to go:
...at least until PHP6 is released.
As stated in the php.net release notes, "Support for PHP 4 has been discontinued since 2007-12-31. Please consider upgrading to PHP 5.2. The release below is the last PHP 4 release." The news archive also notes, "This release wraps up all the outstanding patches for the PHP 4.4 series, and is therefore the last normal PHP 4.4 release. If necessary, releases to address security issues could be made until 2008-08-08," (my emphasis).
While I've often tried to create general-purpose functions and applications that could port to either PHP4 or PHP5, I've decided to forego any further support of PHP4 with any code I create (unless, of course, someone is paying me to create something for PHP4 for some reason). I would therefore like to encourage my fellow PHP hackers (in the good sense) to join me in encouraging all developers to move on to PHP5, and explain to all clients and hosting services that they should migrate to PHP5 ASAP, if for no other reason than to ensure that they can continue to operate with the most secure version of PHP by keeping up with the latest stable releases.
But this upgrade is also to our benefit, opening up access to the much more thorough class and object support of PHP5, enhanced database interfaces such as MySQLi, and new functions like filter_var(), just to name a few of the benefits. Additionally, we should strive to rid our applications of deprecated features and functions, in particular those that will not be supported at all in PHP6. (We don't want to have to upgrade our scripts again, right?) According to Nathan A. Good in "The Future of PHP", the following features will be completely removed from PHP6:
If your scripts depend upon any of those settings, it's time to wean yourself of them now. Don't wait until someone upgrades a server and all your scripts start crashing.