Just a little curious about a few things. When 3.18 is released, if we want to upgrade, we will be forced to upgrade to php5, correct? Will there be any other requirements that are added?
Also, what are some of the new features that are coming in 3.18? I have heard about a few, but just curious about the others that will make all of our lives easier!
3.18 will be PHP5 only, yes. There are no additional requirements at this stage, although we have removed the need for some PEAR packages.
The features added to all versions are reported each week in the developer newsletters. We don’t produce a changelog until the release, but that changelog is built from these newsletters anyway.
You can take a look through all the ones since 3.17 existed (the current development version of 3.18) on the Matrix site:
http://matrix.squiz.net/developer/dev-newsletters
The first issue with 3.18-only features is #139 (10 August 2007):
http://matrix.squiz.net/developer/dev-newsletters
One of the things we are trying to ensure is that Matrix on PHP5 will run on the stock PHP RPMs that ship with RHEL5/CentOS5. So, you shouldn't need any external RPMs or source compiles to get Matrix to run on those distributions. Obviously newer versions would be fine too. You would still need to source the external tools (HTML Tidy, PDFtoHTML and Antiword) yourself.
Thanks for the info guys.
I do read the newsletters religiously, so I guess I should be up on most of the new features. I just figured that there were some features that were not really publicized (like how you mentioned in a post that snippets will now have keywords in the WYSIWYG dropdown) which I never saw anywhere.
We are running on Debian so I am wondering how hard it will be to upgrade to PHP5 when 3.18 comes out.
That will be in today's newsletter. It only got added this week 
# apt-get install php5
+ a few more php5 packages. :)
I hope the above will also include the standard SuSe SLES 10.1 packages?
It might, but our preferred distributions are Debian and RHEL, so we're using those as baselines for package requirements. Other distributions like SUSE will always work, but may require custom package/software installation.
Ahh thats cool, I understand your preferred distro's, we all have them, and sometimes no choice LOL. I just thought, because I think our web group had to purchase you guys a subscription for Suse, that some testing may be done on it to ensure all works well..... Before telling them they have to uninstall PHP4 to move to PHP5 :-)
The upgrade is going to be interesting, to say the least. It will require excessive amounts of co-ordination.
Oh yes I know, I guess all depends on how long is the life in 3.16.x? as they are currently being upgraded to that.
We support up to n - 2. So, the current latest stable is 3.16, and we're still supporting 3.14 and 3.12. So, we'll continue supporting the PHP4/v3.16 version until v3.22 is released, which is about a year after the release of v3.18 or thereabouts.
Also, it is early, I've only had half a coffee and I suck at math, so that may all be wrong. :D
3.16 has its last release on 5th May 2008, when 3.20 comes out: http://matrix.squiz.net/developer/release-dates
We support two stable versions and the dev version, which will be 3.18, 3.20 and 3.21 at that time.
See, I told you I suck at math. 
Thanks Greg.
hehe thats ok Guys, thanks both for the input…
On another note, Greg, the blog item you had on Ajax and screen readers was very interesting, I skimmed over the article, but will read it in depth a little later when I have some time…
Right now I need to open up access to our server for your guys to upgrade our install
It gets a bit heavy 
but it was very interesting.
I found it through LinkedIn if you are interested. They have a LinkedIn that I monitor via RSS and (very) occasional post to. Some questions are tragic, but a few good ones come up from time to time.
[quote]It gets a bit heavy 
but it was very interesting.
I found it through LinkedIn if you are interested. They have a LinkedIn that I monitor via RSS and (very) occasional post to. Some questions are tragic, but a few good ones come up from time to time.[/quote]
Cheers will have to check it out when I get home, we just implemtning site blocking for Social sites, Facebook, myspace etc… and apparently LinkedIn is in its list… Will have to edit the whitelist me thinks hehehe