Moving to PDO - Notice to server admins

We have recently taken the difficult decision of migrating the Xibo code base away from the PHP MySQL extension and over to PHP PDO. Despite this being a significant development effort the end user will not notice any changes.

This change will be rolled out over the next few releases with core functions/inserts/updates/deletes covered from 1.5 series, and all queries covered from 1.7 series.

The advantages to PDO are many – the key ones for us are:

• Potential to support different RDBMS (e.g. SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, etc).
• Prepared SQL statements that protect against SQL injection.
• Support for Transactions.

As a server admin, all that needs to happen on upgrade will be to check that the PHP PDO extension is enabled on your web server installation. PDO ships with PHP 5.1 which is already an Xibo requirement.

For more information on PDO please refer to the PHP manual.