It's in beta, but I think a good MVC framework is all PHP needs to stop looking like such spaghetti. In defense of the Ruby zealots: I've haven't learned Ruby yet, but it's exactly the futuristic *REAL* object-oriented language that's going to propel us into the future. PHP is very old-school in the way code is written -- it DOES encourage spaghetti coding -- and for that I think it deserves to be phased out.
You may need to start by converting your iso-8859-1 or other European ASCII to UTF-8 or another sensible Unicode charset. Some of our MySQL data was in the dreaded windows-1252 encoding, and I had to convert it to UTF. I downloaded the Convert Charset class (found via http://phpclasses.org/ from Mikoaj Jdrzejak, and with that I discovered I could basically convert anything I wanted from whatever charset to whichever charset I like. Wrote a couple scripts, and that was that.
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Try this:
http://www.phpmvc.net/
It's in beta, but I think a good MVC framework is all PHP needs to stop looking like such spaghetti. In defense of the Ruby zealots: I've haven't learned Ruby yet, but it's exactly the futuristic *REAL* object-oriented language that's going to propel us into the future. PHP is very old-school in the way code is written -- it DOES encourage spaghetti coding -- and for that I think it deserves to be phased out.
You may need to start by converting your iso-8859-1 or other European ASCII to UTF-8 or another sensible Unicode charset. Some of our MySQL data was in the dreaded windows-1252 encoding, and I had to convert it to UTF. I downloaded the Convert Charset class (found via http://phpclasses.org/ from Mikoaj Jdrzejak, and with that I discovered I could basically convert anything I wanted from whatever charset to whichever charset I like. Wrote a couple scripts, and that was that.