Feed Genie Review by Gunter Schenk

In this review Gunter will investigate the quality and usage of the Feed Genie Dreamweaver extension from DMXzone. He will create a Picasa Web album as test case and dive more in the endless possibilities of Feed Genie.

PHP related observations

Whenever using PHP scripts from 3rd party vendors, the first thing I do is to scan them for a variety of criteria such as:

a)which PHP versions are supported

b)usage of features or functions which are deprecated in PHP 5.3

c)possible issues which might require a certain php.ini configuration

1. Supported PHP versions

As I couldn´t detect any usage of functions, classes and methods which are specific to PHP 5, and as any native PHP functions used by the Feed Genie libraries are compatible with PHP 4, the scripts should work equally fine with both PHP 4 and 5.

2. Usage of deprecated features/functions

The deprecated functions ereg() and eregi() are used by an auxiliary script, what will throw errors when used with PHP 5.3

3. Possible issues

To read data from a feed cache file stored in the server´s file system, Feed Genie relies on the PHP function fopen(). Some web hosts might disable this function for security reasons, and it´s obvious that Feed Genie will not work under this condition.