Recently the new version of PHP was released: version 5.2.0. It can be downloaded from the PHP.net site, as well as the changelist.

Some of the key features:

• New memory manager for the Zend Engine with improved performance and a more accurate memory usage tracking.
• Input filtering extension was added and enabled by default.
• JSON extension was added and enabled by default.
• ZIP extension for creating and editing zip files was introduced.
• Hooks for tracking file upload progress were introduced.
• Introduced E_RECOVERABLE_ERROR error mode.
• Introduced DateTime and DateTimeZone objects with methods to manipulate date/time information.
• Upgraded bundled SQLite, PCRE libraries.
• Upgraded OpenSSL, MySQL and PostgreSQL client libraries for Windows installations.
• Many performance improvements.
• Over 200 bug fixes.

For a client I am building a web shop. OS Commerce is free PHP web shop software, so I decided to use it because there was not that much budget to buy a very complicated software bundle.

While working on it, I mentioned there was no breathing space in the lay-out. Every simple tag was nested in ‘a’ PHP file. That’s what I think the reason why all OS Commerce powered web shops have the same kind of lay-out with different colors.

I decided to strip all tags from the core code, I hope it will be not that hard… Together with my all time favor Smarty I want to make a highly editable lay-out engine for OS Commerce.

Hope this will not cost that much hours…