Geeklog Themes support the ability to define a different template for different blocks. So your "What's New" block can render differently to your Login block etc. This is done by populating an array called

$_BLOCK_TEMPLATE

in a theme's functions.php file. This array is populated with the identifiers for blocks and can set specific block header and footer templates used to format specific blocks to give them a unique look and feel.

The Professional theme that ships with Geeklog prior to 1.5.1 provides logic within functions.php to alter the template for blocks without a specific template assigned to be the left or right block template depending on which side the block has been placed by the site administrator. This changes with Geeklog 1.5.1

Just a quick reminder: Geeklog will have a booth at this year's FrOSCon, an open source conference to be held in Sankt Augustin, Germany, on August 23 + 24, 2008. If you have a chance, drop by and say Hi!

Some of the FrOSCon presentations will also be streamed live, including the keynotes by Andrew Tanenbaum (on Saturday) and Rasmus Lerdorf, the inventor of PHP (on Sunday). For Dirk's presentation about the Atom Publishing Protocol, you'll have to be there in person (or wait for the recording to be made available after the conference).

See you at FrOSCon!

As you may have seen, August 8, 2008 saw the release of PHP 4.4.9, the last version of PHP 4, ever. In other words, support for PHP 4 by the PHP developers has now officially ended.

For those of you still running your site on PHP 4, now would be a good time to start looking into upgrading to PHP 5. Check with your hosting service.

What does this mean for Geeklog? While there is no immediate pressure to drop support for PHP 4, it would certainly make our lives a bit easier. There will be a bugfix release for Geeklog 1.5.0 with the exact same minimal requirements as 1.5.0 (i.e. PHP 4.1.0). After that, we will start integrating the results of this year's Summer of Code - and we may very well raise the minimum requirements a bit for that release.

But by how much? Let's have a poll to find out what you are running on.