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"PHP Version 5"

Hi

Are there any plans to upgrade PHP to version 5? I would like to register my interest in this matter...

Andy

That's fair enough, thanks for putting in the effort to consider the upgrade at least.

Is there any chance of an upgrade to the latest PHP 4 version (PHP 4.4.7) so as to close of any old security and bug issues that may exist in PHP 4.3.7?

We are still looking into the issues but at this point it doesn't look like we will be upgrading. PHP5 is more memory intensive and would most likley require expanding the number of web servers we have from our current set of ten up to twenty (the way the system distributes load it's not possible to do a smaller expansion then that). This is a substantial upgrade and I'm afraid we cannot justify it at this time.

Have you come to any decision about upgrading to PHP 5 (the current version being PHP 5.1.5)? Perhaps go for a full upgrade of Apache, MySQL and PHP to bring the lot up to date?

Or perhaps get a new server, install all the up to date software on it, and transfer customer web sites who request it, to work as a minimal test bed? I'd be happy to put my site on such a test.

I've been talking this over with our server guys and there are a few issues running them side by side. It's all to do with the amount of extra stress and memory usage it'll put on the web servers and it's not looking like an easy upgrade.

As such I am now looking into the idea of doing a straight upgrade to PHP5 as from what I've been reading over the weekend it shouldn't cause any issues. The only problems I've come across are people who had created functions with the same names as new PHP functions in 5. Has anyone on here had or heard of any other issues with upgrading?

Garin Wrote:
>How about supporting php 5 via cgi?

I couldn't agree more!

It's not difficult to do. There are lots of hosting services that have this facility. Here are some links, for the technical people at Freeola to look into:

This one is from Gentoo
Configure Apache to work with PHP4 and PHP5

Here are some various blog howtos:
Running PHP 4 and PHP 5 Concurrently
Running Apache2 With PHP5 And PHP4 At The Same Time
Running PHP4 and PHP5 together

I could go on and on and on with these links.

Enough excuses guys.

How about supporting php 5 via cgi? You can run it in parallel with php 4 then, if people want to use v5 then they just change their files to .php5 (or whatever file extension you designate).

Unfortunately at the moment we do not have any plans for this. Changing to a new version is a major undertaking and could cause things that worked on 4 to not work correctly. This could obviously cause problems with many of our other customers sites.

If we do ever want to change to a new version we will announce it first.

Hi

Are there any plans to upgrade PHP to version 5? I would like to register my interest in this matter...

Andy