PHP confusion - why do some software still insist on PHP4?

PHP 4 reached its end of life the 31st December 2007. They will continue to fix bugs up until 08 August 2008. Yet, most of the biggest CMS software, guys like Joomla!, Drupal and Wordpress keep on supporting PHP 4 instead of PHP 5. Why on earth?! I do get it that you cannot predict what version of PHP would be on a shared host, but the hosting providers should pull up their socks and upgrade!

PHP 5 is a 1000% improvement on 4 and has been out for a couple of years, so why would some shared hosts still cling to PHP 4? If these guys like Joomla!, Drupal and Wordpress develop in PHP 5, surely hosting companies will be forced to upgrade their PHP version? It is not like they would suddenly break all PHP 4 code as 5 is perfectly backward compatible. So what is the issue? When will this software be rewritten in PHP 5? Hehehe, that would be quite a feat, except that Joomla! 1.5 was written almost from the ground up not all that long ago!

4 Comments to "PHP confusion - why do some software still insist on PHP4?"

• capdog said: On 02/03/2008 at 6:48 am

  Ummm, no.

  PHP upgrades cause huge problems with existing installations, especially people who haven’t upgraded their codebase. I had personal experience with this when my webhost upgraded PHP and it broke my site requiring hours of work from me to try trace the problem. With Drupal, a simple search gives the following:

  http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/support/2006-May/002600.html
  http://drupal.org/node/93456
  http://drupal.org/node/117502
  http://lists.drupal.org/archives/support/2005-11/msg00003.html

  And of course, the problem that I had:

  http://drupal.org/node/102114

  I switched hosting companies because of the amount of stress and time they wasted of mine when they neglected to tell me that they’d done the upgrade.

• Stii said: On 02/03/2008 at 9:10 am

  Interesting, Capdog. I recently installed Drupal on PHP 5, but had no issues. I must say, it was version 5.5 of Drupal. It seems like it was in version < = 4.7.4 and 5 beta 1. New releases would not have these issues. Well, should not.

  I see your point though! Its not “perfectly” backward compatible!

• stii.za.net » Blog Archive » A simple PHP 5 __autoload() example said: On 02/03/2008 at 10:58 am

  [...] is probably the one reason why everyone should switch to PHP 5! According to Charl it is “teh shit”. It is the [...]

• capdog said: On 02/03/2008 at 2:57 pm

  Yep, the new releases do not have the issues, but the problem is that upgrading (Drupal for example), is not always possible. In my case, one module I relied heavily on was not compatible with Drupal 5, so I am still on 4.7.

  I would guess that most people don’t upgrade their codebases nearly as much as they should, so a hosting provider that rolled out a PHP upgrade from 4 to 5 would have to prepare for a nightmare volume of support requests as client’s sites go down.

Spit it out!

Filed in: PHP, Programming by: Stii