PHP 4 end of life announcement
I’ve been traveling about here and there so much lately that I must have missed this on the PHP website:
Today it is exactly three years ago since PHP 5 has been released. In those three years it has seen many improvements over PHP 4. PHP 5 is fast, stable & production-ready and as PHP 6 is on the way, PHP 4 will be discontinued.
The PHP development team hereby announces 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. We will continue to make critical security fixes available on a case-by-case basis until 2008-08-08. Please use the rest of this year to make your application suitable to run on PHP 5.
I taught myself PHP using version 4 and it’s sad to see it go, but at the same time I’m happy. There are tons of improvements in the current version and so many hosts out there only support an older 4.x version. This makes developers choose between having their applications run on the majority of setups or taking advantage of modern day functionality in PHP.
It’s not hard to move your code to PHP 5. In fact, most sites will probably run fine without any problems — at most they’d only need a few tweaks. If you need to transition your application from 4.x to 5.x there’s a Migration Guide available on the PHP website.
