Some of you fine readers may wonder why I'm rolling my own instead of going with a pre-exisiting package. It's mostly a learning excercise and so I can practice new programming techniques (thanks php patterns) behind the scenes. This site is a convenient excuse and by-product

Anyway, specifically I've finally gotten the administration scripts I use to store data in a per-datatype table. Beforehand, every datatype (news item, topic, etc) had its data stored in a single 'records' table - a technique I'd been exposed to at work and that we use with our web content framework Syntax. However, I'd been toying with the idea of being able to put stuff in the db in a more normalized way while still keeping the flexibility of relating objects and modifying input forms.

Another interesting feature I've added is the option to send Trackback pings for news stories from the back end. My next step is to write some public code for accepting and storing trackback pings.

Thanks go out to my Dad's website for beta-testing new code for me unexpectedly . And to my colleague Ginger for letting me use her new blog to test my trackback pings.

*The flaw, in Passport's password recovery mechanism, could have allowed an attacker to change the password on any account to which the username is known. The simplicity of the attack method and the high value of the data frequently stored in Passport accounts--names, addresses, birthdates and credit card numbers--combined to make the vulnerability critical.*

Cnet News.com

However, MS conveniently limits the scope of PHP to the single PHP download and not to the overall PHP community. The overall point I got from the MS arguments is ASP.NET: we give you more in the base distribution. Whereas for PHP you'd have to know where to look for good 3rd party classes and scripts. Personally, I'd like the ZEND folks to keep focused on the making the ZEND engine better.Some of their critiques:\

It is important to note that currently no product such as the Zend Accelerator exists for ASP.NET. The binary code that is generated by the CLR is already as optimized as possible; no add-on product is necessary to achieve maximum performance. In other words, ASP.NET is providing for free what PHP users must purchase from Zend.

There are a number of free add-on optimizers as well.

It is important to note that currently no product such as the Zend Accelerator exists for ASP.NET. The binary code that is generated by the CLR is already as optimized as possible; no add-on product is necessary to achieve maximum performance. In other words, ASP.NET is providing for free what PHP users must purchase from Zend.

But with PHP you also get PEAR.

PHP provides database access through a set of built-in functions. These functions and classes must be compiled into your PHP binaries in order for them to be accessible in your PHP scripts

Unless you use a DB Abstraction library like PEAR:DB or ADODB.