php

How I discovered a critical Drupal 5.13 PHP incopatibility

Submitted by fabio on Sat, 2008-12-13 10:00.

Maybe you already know that, in some countries, the number 13 is associated with bad luck and some people are really frightened of it.

Personally I don't care much of all this stuff.. I don't believe such things.

But seems that Drupal version 5.13 had pretty an unlucky life given that it had been out just for a couple of days and later replaced by the new version 5.14.

Latin1 encoded tables or databases with UTF8 data stored: convert them to native mysql UTF8 Tables/Database

Submitted by fabio on Thu, 2007-08-02 01:42.

In the years before MySQL 4.1, the first MySQL version which provided a complete and good support to different character encodings, developers who needed their databases to store UTF8 encoded data used different encodings (usually latin1) for table and databases while still storing real UTF8 data inside.

While the DB and tables were, as an example latin1 encoded, inside there were actually UTF8 encoded data.

Go PHP 5! Go! Go! Go!

Submitted by fabio on Thu, 2007-07-05 21:28.

PHP is a very good programming language for creating web application. As an example Drupal is written using PHP.

Unfortunately, while already 3 years ago the PHP version 5 has been released, this version is still not yet supported by most of web hosts.

This is really bad because web developers have to stuck with PHP 4 witch is now 7 years old and obviously has few and ugly features compared to PHP 5.