Hey everyone! I’ve just uploaded stripShow 1.6.1, which has a couple of bug fixes:

• Fixed bug where initialization of storylines may take a while if timezone is not set under PHP 5.
• Rewrote transcript code to be more tolerant of whitespace. In addition, equals sign is no longer required for non-character transcript tags.

If your transcripts were all messed up because of whitespace, this is the fix.

As always, the latest version of stripShow is available from the Download page.

OK, so I’ve been neglecting PHP 5 for a while, and only recently updated a few of my sites to run on it. When I did, I found a problem you might run into with stripShow.

If you have a lot of strips and storylines, you may see a serious performance hit under PHP 5 — this is the result of a quirk in the strtotime() function. It is looking up the default timezone for your site, and that takes a moment — it’s doing that several times for each strip, multiplied by each storyline. The delay on my own site added up to about 14 seconds!

There is a solution. It only lags if the default timezone is not set on your PHP site. This is a known issue with PHP 5, and can be read about here.

For the next version of stripShow (which will be 1.6.1, a bug fix release) I’m removing the references to strtotime() from storyline initialization, as I’ve discovered they’re not necessary anyway.