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PHP 4 End of Life Announcement
perbert writes "The PHP development team has announced that support for PHP 4 will continue until the end of this year only. After 2007-12-31 there will be no more releases of PHP 4.4. Critical security fixes will be made available on a case-by-case basis until 2008-08-08. For documentation on migration for PHP 4 to PHP 5, there is a migration guide. There is additional information available in the PHP 5.0 to PHP 5.1 and PHP 5.1 to PHP 5.2 migration guides as well."
The bigger issues is that PHP4 isn't very good (I'm not saying that PHP5 is perfect, but it is significantly better). It shipped in an insecure manner, and a lot of programs rely on that behaviour to run.
An example would be the "Magic Quote GPC" runtime option, that auto escaped " and ' etc. People used this (and still do) as the sole defence against SQL-Injection.
The other thing is that PHP4 wasn't really developed with forward compatibility in mind. One of the changes between 4 and 5 is that the variable $this is reserved - now obviously, good programmers would never call anything "this", they'd assign it a descriptive name. Sadly, PHPs ease of use has meant that everyone with a text editor and a <? echo "hello world" ?> * script calls themselves a programmer. So I've seen ever this issue cause problems.
Getting rid of PHP4 is a very good idea.
J
* - short tags was another strange idea, try having short tags turned on and using "include()" on an xml file (Of course, you shouldn't use include for that purpose...)