The joys of upgrading to PHP 5.3

I have been bitten by a number of things when I updated my PHP to PHP 5.3. These are the changes which I had to make to my php.ini file :

<br /> short_open_tag = 1<br />

This option allows for the use of the short hand "<?" and "?>" used as abbreviations for "<?php" and "php?>". And yes, shorts hand are good, I am super lazy, insofar as I am not good at setting “use strict;” when writing perl code.

Secondly, I was stung due to the fact that PHP 5.3 has clamped down on the returning of values when expecting a reference to be returned by a function, this phenomena and the necessary fix is illustrated in my previous blog post.