Unofficial DreamHost Blog

This month’s Mexican themed newsletter :

Upgrades
- WordPress, ZenCart and MediaWiki one-click-installs has been upgraded in January
- Ruby on Rails has been upgraded and a number of new gems has been installed
- PHP 5.2 and Zend Optimizer 3.2.2 is being rolled out the upcoming week.
Webmail
Two more webmail machines has been added to the load-balanced webmail cluster, [...]

Two minor updates of PHP 4 and MySQL 5. Both updates are security updates, which shouldn’t affect any of you.
MySQL 5 has been upgraded from 5.0.18 to 5.0.24a.
Read changelog…
PHP 4 has been upgraded from 4.4.2 to 4.4.4.
Read changelog…
You can keep track of the current versions of PHP, MySQL and Ruby on Rails at http://php.dreamhosters.com and [...]

Just noticed that you no longer have the choice of running PHP as an Apache Module when setting up a new domain at DreamHost. If you’re currently running PHP as an Apache Module nothing has changed, but you’re no longer able to choose Apache when setting up a new domain or making changes to an [...]

DreamHost has quietly added support for the PHP Data Object (PDO) extension to their PHP5 installation.
PDO offers a lightweight, consistent interface for accessing databases in PHP. PDO provides a data-access abstraction layer, which means that, regardless of which database you’re using, you use the same functions to issue queries and fetch data. PDO does not provide [...]

PHP5 has been updated from 5.0.4 to 5.1.2 according to php.dreamhosters.com.
The upgrade to 5.1.0 is a major update and includes:

A complete rewrite of date handling code, with improved timezone support
Significant performance improvements compared to PHP 5.0.X
PDO extension is now enabled by default
Over 30 new functions in various extensions and built-in functionality
Bundled libraries, PCRE and SQLite upgraded to [...]

PHP4 has been updated from version 4.3.10 to 4.4.1 according to php.dreamhosters.com.
The changes from 4.3.10 to 4.4.1 are only maintenance releases addressing numerous non-critical bux fixes, a number of security fixes related to the overwriting of the GLOBALS array and a memory corruption problem. No new features has been added.

After our own DreamHost Year in Review, I would like to point those of you interested in PHP to two interesting roundups of the year just ended: Derick Rethans (PHP Developer) has written PHP Look Back 2005 and Enygma from phpdeveloper.org has written A (Lengthy) Look Back at PHP in 2005.

Two new PHP/Ajax applications, RoundCube and TurboDbAdmin, has got a lot of publicity lately.
RoundCube Webmail is a browser-based email client with a very nice interface and functionality a bit like GMail, but available to install on your own server. TurboDbAdmin is an online database administration tool like phpMyAdmin (which is currently being used at DreamHost’s [...]