Making php-mode Compatible with Emacs 23

Question

I am using Emacs 23 and php-mode.el 1.5.0. When I have this in my .emacs:

(require 'php-mode)

I get this error message when Emacs starts:

Warning (initialization): An error occurred while loading `/Users/kdj/.emacs':

error: `c-lang-defconst' must be used in a file

To ensure normal operation, you should investigate and remove the
cause of the error in your initialization file.  Start Emacs with
the `--debug-init' option to view a complete error backtrace.

If I evaluate (require 'php-mode) after Emacs starts, I don't get any error messages.

I found a blog entry which indicates that this problem is specific to Emacs 23 (that is, there is no error with Emacs 22.x), but it doesn't give any solutions.

Don't know if this matters, but I'm using Mac OS X, and I built Emacs from the current CVS sources, using ./configure --with-ns.

Anybody know what's going on here, and/or how I can fix it?

Answer 1

I ran into the same problem when trying to get the csharp-mode up and running. I finally found the solution when digging into the actual emacs lisp file for csharp-mode:

;;   This code doesn't seem to work when you compile it, then
;;   load/require in the emacs file. You will get an error (error
;;   "`c-lang-defconst' must be used in a file") which happens because
;;   cc-mode doesn't think it is in a buffer while loading directly
;;   from the init. However, if you call it based on a file extension,
;;   it works properly. Interestingly enough, this doesn't happen if
;;   you don't byte-compile cc-mode.

So, the quick and dirty fix to put in your .emacs is to auto load on extension and not put (require 'php-mode) or (load "php-mode") in there. Without further ado,

(autoload 'php-mode "php-mode" "Major mode for editing php code." t)
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.php$" . php-mode))
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.inc$" . php-mode))

Hope this helps! Now I just need to get the php/html mode switching stuff working. Wish me luck.

Answer 2

Thanks! Works great!

Answer 3

It works fine with http://mewde.googlecode.com/files/php-mode-new.el.