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PHP 4 End of Life Announcement

Posted by Zonk on from the sniffle dept.

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."

3 of 125 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Thank God by Arancaytar · · Score: 5, Informative

    You'd be surprised how many shared web-hosts are still out there running ancient and unpatched PHP versions. Partly out of laziness and partly out of an unwillingness to make their customers work on their equally ancient applications. register_globals being enabled can be one of the least security concerns there.

    See also http://gophp5.org/

  2. Needed But Will Be Troublesome by detain · · Score: 5, Insightful

    While I can completely understand the need for this to occur, I can see this causing alot of problems for many small businesses, personal webpages, and hosting companies. PHP5 is definitly worthwhile switching to from PHP4, but there are so many poorly coded sites out there that wont run properly under PHP5, and this at some point is going to cause a nightmare for various hosting companies.

    Your typical small business or personal webpage will frequently use PHP, and have little knowledge of how to fix their code to get it working, or how to upgrade their 3rd party software to a PHP5 Compatible version. At the same time hosting companies who will reach a point where they need to upgrade to PHP5 in order to keep their systems as secure as possible (because PHP4 security fixs might not be coming out) will be faced with many angry customers who are unwilling to spend time or money to change a site that they see as working previously.

    I can completely understand why a company might need to stop supporting an old version of their product at some point when newer ones are freely available, I just am not looking forward to all the headaches its going to cause. I can hear the phones of angry customers threatening to kill me because i "broke their site" now.

    Oh well, hopefully all PHP5 code will wind up working just fine in PHP6 when it comes out.

    --
    http://interserver.net/
  3. Coordinated switch-to-5 campaign by yelvington · · Score: 5, Informative

    Coinciding with this announcement is the launch of a campaign to switch major PHP-based Web applications to PHP5-only support. The GoPHP5.org website has details.

    Projects supporting this move have pledged that by Feb. 5, 2008, they will no longer accept PHP4-specific changes in their codebase and that all future upgrades will assume PHP5 availability.

    This doesn't mean they are rewriting all their code to OOP-style, or that they will end legacy version support for security patches, et cetera. What it means is that the developers are liberated from having to code around PHP4's limitations and can take advantage of PHP5 features for all future enhancements.

    Often something that might require hundreds of lines of code in PHP4 can be done with just a few in PHP5. The SimpleXML parser is probably the best example.

    Application teams already on board for this switch include Drupal, phpMyAdmin, Typo3, Symphony, Gallery, DeskPRO, and many others. Several major projects not yet committed are known to be preparing to do so.

    This is most important to hosting companies as a signal that robust PHP5 support is a requirement going forward.