As reported on the site Go PHP 5, many PHP developers across the Web have decided not to support PHP4 as of February, 2008, so that they can move on ahead and make better products using PHP5.2. In addition, PHP6 is coming down the line and there is only so much support developers can handle. Some of these include major popular services , like Drupal and Gallery.

Programs written on PHP4 may have difficulty or errors running on PHP5.  Thus it is crucial to be updated to the latest versions of those programs.   What does this mean for your customers? It means you need to take a look at which of the programs on the list at Go PHP 5 your clients are running.  In fact, you may want to check softwares that are not on the list if your clients are running them and find out if they are PHP5-ready.  You will also need to take a look at their hosting services to see when and if they are upgrading to PHP5, if they have done so already.

This is a very good opportunity to improve your customers’ Web services. Perhaps they are long past due for an upgrade, or are not up to date on backups. In addition, if a host is not upgrading, perhaps it is time they moved off of that host.

Part of my job is bridging the gap so that my clients’ sites can run more effectively and efficiently with minimal interruption, so that they barely notice. Take the time to review your clients one by one and contact them. They don’t need to know all the technical details, but they should be aware that you are working to improve how they get their message out to customers.

It’s been much too long since I’ve posted, but from December through this week, I have not only been relocating but also redesigning and recoding my business site, Art By Tech.

I used DIVs and CSS (except some tables in the portfolio, but I’ll be fixing that), and created this lovely plug & play sidebar - isn’t it cute?

First I defined a variable as the current page using $_SERVER[’SCRIPT_NAME’]. Then I check the name of the page and put the conditional include statements: no sidebar for index, sidebar2 for portfolio and contact pages, and my own lovely news sidebar for everything else. Simple.

The power of PHP include files is so incredible - old news I know, but I love to do stuff myself instead of using a CMS. I used them not only for my news & events sidebar, but also to create a dummy sidebar (with if/esleif/else statement) to fake out and eliminate the sidebar (but not the div) for the homepage and portfolio. Include files allowed me alternate style sheetsheet selection, navigation separation, and IE conditional comments. Not to mention the fact that all pertinent info is in an include file so you can access it.

In my 2005 design, I used include files and a kind of complex if/else statement to select the appropriate header image for different sections. The problem is that when I got into that, the design took forever to deploy as I am so finicky about photos.

I probably should have used case for all this instead of if/else. Something to try in my “free time” (ha).

Not much else, but this has inspired me to do more in-depth, serious programming with PHP. I visited Friends of Ed today - a fabulous publisher - to see what was new for CS3 (in the budget with a Mac for 2007) and found this:
The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3 with CSS, Ajax, and PHP

It’s coming out in July and it’s costly, but it’s EXACTLY what I’m looking for. I’ll have to download some other ebooks from them in the meantime.

Sweeeeet!! (Or should I say “Suite”?)