My book, PHP Security Guide is now available for purchase on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Unfortunately both of these stores have the book's title wrong in different and "creative" fashions, more so on B&N where they've decided to come up with their own creative title :P. Hopefuly these will be corrected in short order and additional info about the book (that was sent to them) will appear as well. Non the less, both stores now carry the book and have stock ready to ship, so if you want a copy you can now get one for under $25.

Two weeks late, but, better late then never, that's what I think :-). The September issue of PHP|Architect, has a fairly long and hopefully interesting article on PDO covering all of the new features found at the time. As far as PDO material goes, aside from the manual it is probably the most up to date resource on it that you can find. And even then it does not cover my BC break that was made recently. So if you are considering using PDO, this is definitely something that should be of interest. The issue also held a pleasant surprise for me, which was a fairly detailed and positive review of FUDforum, yey! It only got 4 stars (out of 5), but I did manage to acquire the missing star directly from Peter (Forum’s Reviewer, thanks for the review btw) on a napkin, PERFECTION!!! :-).

It is that time of year again! No, its not Christmas it is time for yet another FUDforum release :-). As usual we start with RC1 and follow it up with the stable final in short order. This release is going to be a mostly bug fix oriented version with a number minor features enchantments. You can download the installer or upgrade script at the listed links. If you don't want to read the complete changelog (whole 19 entries of it listed below) here are some highlights. Added RSS links to several pages to simplify getting feeds from the forum. phpBB2 converter fixes. You can now turn on captcha validation for anonymous user postings (BIG help in comment spam reduction). French translation is now fully up to date. Complete ChangeLog Fixes to the external fud login/logout API. A number of PostgreSQL query fixes. Improved indexing for multibyte text. MySQL 4.1 optimizations for making forum read. Adjust PDO driver to work with latest 5.1 release (use class constants). Added subscribed...

As of few minutes ago PDO extension allows constructor overloading, which is something a lot of people had asked for. This means that you can do things like this: [php] class myDB extends PDO { public function construct() { parent::construct("DSN", "login","pass"); } } [/php] Keep in mind that if you don't call the original PDO constructor via parent::__construct() an error will be generated, so exercise caution when using this feature.

Today I've had the distinct pleasure of breaking nearly every single PDO based script in existence (my own code included), feels good :-). The break is the result of something that we, the PDO developers forgot to do. This being making PDO constants be class constants rather the polluting the main constant space. After much discussion on the topic at PHP|Works we've decided we need to fix this before it is too late (5.1 final release). So a bit of a pain at this time, should provide for a more robust and flexible interface. What does this mean in terms of your code? Well whenever you've used a PDO constant for example PDO_FETCH_NUM you'd now use PDO class constant PDO::FETCH_NUM. To simplify the conversion I offer the following Perl scriptlet: perl -p -i -e 's/PDO_/PDO::/g' [list of files]