Comments on: WordPress and PHP 5: Be the Change You Want to See

By: Ian Stewart

Ian Stewart — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 19:58:16 +0000

Aaron, have you considered writing a “Here’s Why You Need to Make Sure Your Web Host is Using PHP 5″ post for someone like Darren Rowse over at ProBlogger? I’m sure it would go a long way towards getting the WordPress community below that 10% PHP 4 margin that Matt, and other developers have suggested, is the tipping point for WordPress moving to PHP 5.

By: Joel McLaughlin

Joel McLaughlin — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 19:46:49 +0000

Great points Aaron, it is ridiculous to complain about a well designed application and have no community respect and step up to the plate and help. I think WordPress is an amazing application and has excellent programmers, and obviously issues will always arise that need to be addressed.

By: Addison PSF

Addison PSF — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 23:02:47 +0000

Excellent advice, it’s similar to elections, don’t complain unless you are willing to make a difference yourself, however, you have a lot of ground to stand on with your immense experience.

By: JR White

JR White — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:05:44 +0000

I can’t see them dropping php4 support just yet. There are loads of casual bloggers out there still on php4 and probably don’t even realise it. Cutting out php4 would cause a whole host of problems overnight.

By: Joe LeBlanc

Joe LeBlanc — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:29:49 +0000

Agreed. In my experience with Joomla plugins, many people even think they’re already running PHP 5 when they’re actually running 4. In some cases, hosts have offered a choice between the two with PHP 4 as the default.

By: Drew Strojny

Drew Strojny — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 02:56:42 +0000

Great post Aaron. Funny you should mention this, I brought up the PHP4 issue a little over a month ago over at WP Tavern and a decent discussion ensued.

The numbers are deceptive. I imagine the vast majority of those users are on shared hosts that are just to lazy to migrate their customers to PHP5. It is highly unlikely WP would lose 12% of its users in this scenario. I am willing to bet 50 – 75% of those users would ask their host to upgrade them to PHP5 if they were presented with a friendly WP error message instructing them to do so.

By: Aaron Brazell

Aaron Brazell — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 23:40:06 +0000

I didn’t think you were throwing mud, Joe. I was looking squarely at Brandon. And to a lesser extent, I was continuing my conversation with Chris Pearson, who develops the Thesis theme, from last week over IM.

By: Joe LeBlanc

Joe LeBlanc — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 22:10:55 +0000

The problem with this approach (as we’ve seen in the Joomla community) is that the more code you hack to work under PHP 4, the more code you have to fix in PHP 5 later.

Why am I not writing patches for WordPress? Because I’m busy writing this patch for Joomla 1.6 so that functions don’t return references: an attempt at saving memory under PHP 4 that’s counter-productive in PHP 5. The Joomla project put an incredible amount of effort into making 1.5 compatible with PHP 4 & 5, which in retrospect was a huge waste of time. There’s no reason for WordPress to repeat this mistake.

While you might say I’m “throwing mud,” I’d say I’m just speaking from pained experience.

By: Dre

Dre — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 20:02:35 +0000

The PHP4 numbers continue to drop, it’s a matter of time before the full move is made.

Posts like this will continue to help those efforts, maybe empowering people who otherwise wouldn’t get involved.

Definitely all good things ;)

By: Keith Casey

Keith Casey — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 19:51:58 +0000

Well, the E_DEPRECATED warning is a list of stuff that will *disappear* in PHP6, mostly due to security or performance reasons, etc. So working against that list will make WordPress more secure and faster, give it more time to live on PHP5 without nasty errors that are confusing/scary to most users…and it will make the *next* transition smoother.

All good things. :)

By: Aaron Brazell

Aaron Brazell — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 19:13:44 +0000

Sounds good to me. WordPress is not likely to move straight to PHP 5.3, but if these changes make sense outside of that context, then why not?

By: Keith Casey

Keith Casey — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:58:19 +0000

How’s this:

In web2project, we’re currently working to be fully PHP 5.3 compatible – handling E_DEPRECATED, updating for E_STRICT, etc – I’ll write up all of the changes that we’ve had to do along with detailed steps and put them on our wiki. Some of it will be patches, some howto’s, and probably other notes. From there, I’ll reach out within the WordPress community and share all of it to see what can be used where.

As I noted on Twitter… when one of those 2M PHP4 WordPress installations gets hacked, *no one* is going to scream “someone hacked my php!”.

They’re going to scream “someone hacked my WordPress install!” ;)