PHP 4 has served the web developer community for seven years now, and served it well. However, it also shows its age. Most of PHP 4's shortcomings have been addressed by PHP 5, released three years ago, but the transition from PHP 4 to PHP 5 has been slow for a number of reasons.

PHP developers cannot leverage PHP 5's full potential without dropping support for PHP 4, but PHP 4 is still installed on a majority of shared web hosts and users would then be forced to switch to a different application. Web hosts cannot upgrade their servers to PHP 5 without making it impossible for their users to run PHP 4-targeted web apps, and have no incentive to go to the effort of testing and deploying PHP 5 while most web apps are still compatible with PHP 4 and the PHP development team still provides maintenance support for PHP 4. The PHP development team, of course, can't drop maintenance support for PHP 4 while most web hosts still run PHP 4.

It is a dangerous cycle, and one that needs to be broken. The PHP developer community has decided that it is indeed now time to move forward, together. Therefore, the listed software projects have all agreed that effective February 5th, 2008, any new feature releases will have a minimum version requirement of at least PHP 5.2.0. Furthermore, the listed web hosts have agreed that effective February 5th, 2008, they will include PHP 5.2 (or a more recent version) in their service offer.

It is our belief that this will provide web hosts reason to upgrade and the PHP development team the ability to retire PHP 4 and focus efforts on PHP 5 and the forthcoming PHP 6, all without penalizing any existing project for being "first out of the gate".

GoPHP5.org

Will IPS also stop supporting php versions < 5.2.0?

It's not as easy as that when you have customers who have paid for support.

We'll likely review the minimum PHP version requirement for our next major increment (IP.Board 3.0.0).

Awesome I run PHP5 as default on my webhost already since thats what Facebook Applications use I think.

Plus many hosts that run PHP 5 run them as CGI Modules. If anyone needs PHP 4 hosts can install them as FastCGI and upgrade the PHP 4 to PHP 5 as the Apache Modules. :)

I would gladly see IP.Board take advantage of PHP5. To keep the development in progress.

A modification to my host's .htaccess file will allow me to use PHP5 processing of pages, works great too.

Also, writing my CMS in PHP 5.2.

It's not as easy as that when you have customers who have paid for support.

We'll likely review the minimum PHP version requirement for our next major increment (IP.Board 3.0.0).

People still running PHP 4.x should get a slap for beeing slow to upgrade, s

We need to put pressure on hosting to upgrade to PHP5, as long as us programmers don't make website owners ask their hosts why they're running outdated software, nothing will progress.

We need to put pressure on hosting to upgrade to PHP5, as long as us programmers don't make website owners ask their hosts why they're running outdated software, nothing will progress.

I use PHP5 alot but my host no offense to them but when a new 5.2.x comes out takes them longr then anyone else to upgrade

I just have a problem with the fact that PHP suffers as a language due to so many people using outdated versions.

I didn't even bother with learning any php until php5 because, well, php4 is really boring.

I dont see how PHP4 is boring compared to PHP5, there aren't actually that many changes, the one which most people would notice is the better error reporting on PHP5. But there pretty similar.

We'll likely review the minimum PHP version requirement for our next major increment (IP.Board 3.0.0).

At least 5.1. please! :D

I dont see how PHP4 is boring compared to PHP5, there aren't actually that many changes, the one which most people would notice is the better error reporting on PHP5. But there pretty similar.

1. real classes
2. SOAP / XML
3. PDO

there aren't actually that many changes.

Yeah right :blink:

PHP5 changelog: http://www.php.net/ChangeLog-5.php

You also might want to read the latest post at php.net: http://www.php.net/index.php#2007-07-13-1

We need to put pressure on hosting to upgrade to PHP5, as long as us programmers don't make website owners ask their hosts why they're running outdated software, nothing will progress.

Speaking as someone who hosts & maintins forums I can say that I've only been happy with PHP 5 since the 5.2.x releases. Early releases were buggy and alot of security measures made 5 a considerable amount slower than 4.4.x revisions.

Also if people on those servers have CMS applications and similar that are written in php 4 then there is a chance (as we've witnessed first hand here) that you'll break it when you update to 5. We have to run both 4 & 5 (one ISAPI DLLs & one CGI-FGI) which is a right pain in the prov!

Lion, I meant big changes. The changelog you gave me is just 99% bug fixes.

How about the PHP SPL? http://www.php.net/spl
PDO? http://www.php.net/pdo
Simple XML? http://www.php.net/simple_xml
DOM? http://www.php.net/dom

http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.oop5.php

If these are not big changes then please define what is.

There is also a lot of smaller additions which are very useful such as this example from php.net.

<?php
$arr = array(1, 2, 3, 4);
foreach ($arr as &$value) {
    $value = $value * 2;
}
// $arr is now array(2, 4, 6, 8)
?>

APC is also very stable with php 5.2.x - http://www.php.net/apc

Hmm, didnt know about those, I surrender :P

Since IPB has been OOP from the beginning, the changes to OOP that PHP5 bring would be a big benefit aside from the others.

Since IPB has been OOP from the beginning, the changes to OOP that PHP5 bring would be a big benefit aside from the others.

I'm sure the new xml handling will be useful as well.