This week has been a time of upgrading software that Wikidot uses to serve its services to the world. We've upgraded PHP (the language that Wikidot is mostly written in) to version 5.3. It doesn't really change anything important, but "new is always better". Well, almost always.

We had an issue with upgrading libxml2 which resulted in a broken Feed module. This was caused by a small change in the library that required an upgrade to PHP 5.3 - but we were still using PHP 5.2, which as it appeared was not fully compatible. To fix the Feed module we downgraded libxml2 back to a version used before, but this was a temporary solution. A few days later, we upgraded both PHP and libxml2. Starting from 15 June, Wikidot servers run on PHP 5.3 without any serious problems. We only located one minor error in our code which was silently ignored before, and now generates a warning in the error log.

Since its early days Wikidot supported LaTeX-style equations in wiki pages. Since I come from academic and university circles, I felt that embedding math within wiki pages is very important for a project like ours. Right now, almost 5,000 Wikidot sites use LaTeX-style math expressions to publish scientific results or enable collaboration between researchers or students.