Go PHP 5, Go!

Submitted by Larry on 5 July 2007 - 1:09am

Go PHP 5!

"Never believe that a few caring people can't change the world. For, indeed, that's all who ever have." --Margaret Mead

A while back, various people were lamenting the state of PHP 5 adoption, myself included. What to do about it? How to get hosts to let programmers leverage the added functionality that PHP 5 offers? How can we do that without cutting off 80% of our user base?

The solution a few people suggested was team work. If all PHP projects stopped supporting PHP 4 and made the jump to PHP 5 at the same time, none of them is penalized in the market for being "first" and web hosts will have a clear business case to upgrade their systems to PHP 5. We can then all start offering faster, cleaner, more powerful, more secure web software.

But how does one get all PHP projects together to agree on something like that? Actually, it's fairly simple. You ask them.

After two months of planning and asking, the GoPHP5 effort goes live today. Six leading open source PHP projects have all agreed that it is time to leave PHP 4 to its rightful place in history: in the past. And I know of several other projects I've spoken to in the past few weeks that will likely sign on in the near future; not to mention the dozens of projects that I haven't even gotten to yet.

Web hosts take notice: PHP 4 is dying, and will soon be dead. PHP 5 is the future, and its time is now.

If you're involved in a PHP project, get involved! The more projects commit to PHP 5.2 on 5.2.2008, the stronger a message we can all send and the sooner we can all leverage the power and flexibility of the PHP team's latest and greatest. Even if your project is already using PHP 5, committing to 5.2 and listing your project with GoPHP5 will further spur adoption of PHP 5, which broadens your potential install base.

Innumerable thanks to all of the projects that have signed on so far, and to the rest of the GoPHP5 team: Robert Douglass, Dries Buytaert, Ken Rickard, Marc Delisle, and Jonah Braun.

Now the hard part begins. Let's change the PHP world.