PHP 4 Releases and Support Stops by Year End
July 14th, 2007PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML. PHP 5 is fast, stable and production-ready and as PHP 6 is on the way, the PHP development team announced that support for PHP 4 will continue until the end of this year only.
After 31 December 2007, there will be no more releases of PHP 4.4, however, they will continue to make critical security fixes available on a case-by-case basis until 8 August 2008. This time frame has been kept to allow people to make their applications suitable to run on PHP 5. The current PHP 5 Stable release is 5.2.3 and historical PHP 4 stable release is 4.4.7 (which will now be discontinued at 2007-12-31).
Thinking about migrating from PHP 4 to PHP 5? PHP 5 and the integrated Zend Engine 2 have greatly improved PHP’s performance and capabilities, but care has been taken to break as little existing code as possible, so migrating your code from PHP 4 to 5 should be easy.
I just checked the Wordpress minimum requirements page and to run WordPress your host needs a PHP version 4.2 or greater and MySQL version 4.0 or greater. However, as they had warned developers that WordPress 2.1 will require MySQL 4.0, they will emphasize the new PHP requirements for latest versions of Wordpress.
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I’m curious how providers will handle this. This will be the first time I go through such a change with my host provider and I’ve already written them to ask their status. It sounds like there’s some potential for breaking stuff with folks on different versions of PHP, MySQL and WordPress…
I assume that most providers will update the PHP software accordingly, although that will cause a lot of headaches I’m sure. We all knew that support for PHP4 wouldn’t last forever…we’ve always got to move on to bigger and better things.