web notes - a blog

This is the second half of the prior post - how to find out what version of PHP are running on your server. Use curl with the -I (uppercase i) option, followed by the domain name to get the HTTP headers. There are many options you can use with curl, and the server can be configured to suppress some of this information for improved security - so if you don’t get the results you need, refer to the man pages and try again.

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Fri, 21 Mar 2008 23:11:07 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.41 (Unix) mod_jk/1.2.23 mod_deflate/1.0.21 mod_fastcgi/2.4.2 PHP/5.2.3 mod_auth_passthrough/1.8 mod_log_bytes/1.2 mod_bwlimited/1.4 PHP/4.4.8 FrontPage/5.0.2.2634a mod_ssl/2.8.31 OpenSSL/0.9.7a
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.4.8
Content-Type: text/html

Another approach is to create one file, ver.php, and link to it called ver.php5. It should contain the following:

echo phpversion();

Request both URLs through a browser to see what version is used to deliver them.

My server has PHP4 as the default, and PHP5 available, indicated by the extension .php5. To use eZ publish 4.0, you need PHP5. To use it, one approach is to get a list of the PHP files, like so:

tar tzf eztagcloud.tgz > php_file_list

Use grep and sed to create a script to rename the files, as follows:

grep “\.php” php_file_list | sed “s/\(\(.*\)\.php\)/mv \1 \2.php5/” > php5

Make php5 executable:

chmod 700 php5

Untar the tar file:

tar xzf eztagcloud.tgz

Run php5:

./php5

Check by using:

ls -R eztagcloud/* | grep “php”

Change the filename.extension in the rewrite rules on the target from index.php to index.php5.

The include and require directives in the files must also be updated with the new extension. The file list extracted from the tar file could be used to feed a series of sed commands that substitute .php5 for .php.

grep “\.php” php_file_list | sed “s/\(\(.*\)\.php\)/sed –in-place \"s\/\\\.php\/\\\.php5\/\” \15/” > php52

Make php52 executeable.

If you don’t have alot of experience with eZ publish, and LAMP - this entire post should be considered extremely risky. However, it will not take long to check the success or failure of this idea - so it is definitely worth a try. Apologies for not testing it fully.

This approach should work for any application, and you may want to reverse it - so PHP5 is the default language, and PHP4 is accessible by extension. Good luck.

This link has some great suggestions about how to use htaccess to route all .php requests through php5. Set at the directory or account level, it may eliminate the renaming requiremnets. I couldn’t do it on my server, but others may be able to use it. Thanks to the author.
http://corz.org/serv/tricks/htaccess.php

.htaccess file

php5_value date.timezone 'America/Chicago'
php_value allow_call_time_pass_reference 0
php5_value magic_quotes_gpc 0


FilesMatch "."
order allow,deny
deny from all
/FilesMatch

FilesMatch "(index\.php5|\.(gif|jpe?g|png|css|js|html)|var(.+)storage.pdf(.+)\.pdf)$"
order allow,deny
allow from all
/FilesMatch


RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule content/treemenu/?$ index_treemenu.php5
RewriteRule index_treemenu.php5 - [L]

RewriteRule !\.(gif|jpe?g|png|css|js|html)|var(.+)storage.pdf(.+)\.pdf$ index.php5

DirectoryIndex index.php5

Run the installer - use .php5. Before you start fine tuning, be sure to change the extensions in settings/dbschema.ini and settings/codetemplates.ini.

Be sure to adhere to the requirements for eZ4, including eZ components, which can be processed with this approach as well.

*** This configuration is only intended for testing, production sites should be supported appropriately ***

A side effect of accelerating development by assembling systems of available open source components is the risk of incompatibility.

In this case, one must choose between abandoning the component, or modifying it. My recommendation is almost always to abandon it, because it is often an issue with the platform and the age of the component.

This error:

Assigning the return value of new by reference is deprecated

Was thrown by a great piece of software, on a PHP 5 platform.

I checked the release date and it looks like the software is not being updated. So, I chose a different package.

As a general rule, I don’t modify open source code. I strive to understand how the developers intended for it to be used, and work within those constraints. There are a few occasions when I will apply a patch or a quick fix because there is no alternative, but not many.

This has business impacts. It is almost always less expensive to use existing code than write new code. The tradeoff is that you accept a learning curve and some limitations to save the time. Thus - the code must be powerful and flexible enough to meet the requirements and must be fairly easy to use. Anything that is too difficult to work with should be discarded quickly.

There is so much awesome open source code available, and some of it is very powerful. To build a powerful, cost-effective solution, the best approach is to use open source code to provide the bulk of the functionality, and then extend or integrate the remaining elements.

The complexity is in gracefully combining elements from diverse sources into a cohesive unit, and ensuring the design is manageable in the event that more than one application is used on the site.

The choice of components is extremely important. I think the only way you can really decide is to try them out.

Fast AJAX
To speed up an AJAX page load, particularly with a toolkit such as dojo, you can do the following:

• Set the cache headers on the server for ‘far-future’ dates on toolkit files, and any other files that don’t change often. Use the directory name and a FilesMatch directive
• Break the HTML/CSS/javascript into separate files, and set the caching properly
• Use compression (mod_deflate). If you have a large initial page load, followed by many small AJAX requests, the compression overhead may not be worth it.
• Use dynamic loading to defer the loading of content until it is needed where possible

Use the YSlow plugin for Mozilla Firefox to check for other performance improvements.

Dual Page Population
Often there is some server-side logic that runs the same for the initial page load and later AJAX requests. One approach is to send a flag that indicates whether it is an AJAX request, and to use json_encode followed by an exit() to return the results for AJAX, or Smarty variables to return a full HTML page.