🕸Fergus Duniho wrote on Tue, Jan 5, 2016 03:53 PM UTC:
One thing I want to work on, perhaps while fixing the scripts for making
submissions, is to switch from mysql_* functions to PDO* functions. The
mysql_* functions have been deprecated in PHP, and they will be removed
from a future version of PHP. So I looked into the alternatives, these
being Improved MySQL (mysqli_*) and PHP Data Objects (PDO*). Both have the
advantage over mysql_* of allowing prepared statements. PDO has two main
advantages over mysqli. The one I think will help most is that it allows
named parameters in prepared statements. The other is that it supports more
database formats than just mysql. This is not so important right now, since
I will continue to use the mysql format, but if the mysql format were ever
deprecated, or something much better came along, it would be easier to make
the change if the code were already using the PDO* functions.