The End of PHP 4
PHP development team made the “PHP 4 end of life announcement“.
According to PHP development team, PHP 5 has been released for 3 years and it is fast, stable and production-ready. PHP 6 is on the way. Therefore, PHP 4 will be discontinued after serving the Internet for 7 years.
The support of PHP4 will continue until the end of 2007. There will be no more releases of PHP4 after 2007. The critical fixes will be available until August 2008.
If you have a PHP4 application, it is time to make sure that it runs on PHP5. You are recommended to refer to the migration guide of PHP4 to PHP5.
In order to push PHP5, PHP developers community agreed to have minimum version requirement of at least PHP 5.2.0 of their software projects at February 5th, 2008. There are a list of supporting projects and hosts at GoPHP5.org.
My two cents
I do not know PHP5 but, as far as I know, PHP5 is generally backward compatible to PHP4 (with some backward incompatible changes).
For web hosting providers, it is hard for them to upgrade their web servers to PHP5 because major clients are still using web applications that do not support PHP5. However, I think the web hosting providers should take a step further and “force” upgrade at 2008 by giving early notice to their clients. What do you think?
P.S. Matt has other opinions.
Liew, WP2.2 is coded which version PHP ?
Well, PHP5 broke many Joomla sites, which happens to be one of the most popular multi-purpose CMS on the Web today. These webmasters are scrambling to catch up.
Under ‘Go PHP 5’ image, I can saw an error message “height=â€Â65″ width=â€Â200″ alt=â€ÂSupport GoPHP5.org— in Opera browser. Please check :P
Thanks for the heads up Liew. I DO have a couple (in fact too many apps running on PHP4) but they pretty straightforward read-from-database stuff. Shouldn’t be a problem to upgrade.
@hanneng: WordPerss 2 works under PHP5
Thanks for the info Liew!
Die, I am still using PHP3!
Eheh Kitkat….
PHP3 … me too…. lets die together-gether
I’m a PHP programmer. About 50% of the apps written at my office is on PHP4. Only the newer web apps are in PHP5. Still it’s no big deal as conversion is not too difficult. Mostly small changes in code will make our old codes become PHP5 compliant.
WordPress works on PHP4 but does not use old PHP4 functions or variables so it is also ‘upward’ compatible with PHP5.
I hate Joomla after trying it a bit on some of my websites. It’s just an overglorified CMS. Drupal is better with good support for PHP5.
Waaa….my PHP sifu Andrew Ooi also here ar… yeah PHP 4 is ending but actually there’s not much to change from PHP4 to PHP5. Some syntax in PHP4 doesn’t support in PHP5 you need to rectify those syntax and do the appropriate changes.
And start to pick up CakePHP and PHP in OOP. You will get used to it…once you undertsand