Previously I wrote about the Go PHP 5 campaign and their attempt to get developers and hosts to publicly declare their intent to abandon PHP 4 on February 5, 2008.

Their campaign just got a big boost. It’s official—PHP 4 dies at the end of 2007. (This is where you should insert the nostalgic music and a montage of all those moments with PHP 4 we remember fondly.)

From PHP.net:

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.

For documentation on migration for PHP 4 to PHP 5, we would like to point you to our 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.

I think this is the right move and that it should be enough time for everyone to adjust. I’ll be watching the transition with interest. It’s an interesting case study in how to migrate a massive installed base away from an entrenched version. But after three years of having PHP 5 available, I think we all agree someone’s got to cut the cord.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 13th, 2007 at 8:00 am and is filed under PHP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.