SilverStripe supports GoPHP5!

Posted by Sigurd on 9 July 2007

A few days ago a campaign, GoPHP5, launched to encourage software producers and webhosting companies using the widely-used PHP language to upgrade from version 4 to 5. Version 5 is several years old, works great, but the industry has been lazy to upgrade.

I think GoPHP5 is great, because we've been tirelessly justifying why we cannot support PHP4 and explaining the virtues of PHP5 since before we released... quite simply: supporting PHP4 is equivilent to the extra work, hassle and restrictions developers used to face supporting archaic browsers like Netscape4. The world sighed relief when Netscape4 support was dropped, and it will again with PHP4.

There is more than just simply upgrading, however. In the same way a webpage can be "standards compliant" (valid HTML and CSS), but still be a real mess of tags and thus altogether miss the spirit of web standards, for PHP5-only code to be good, it requires the programmer to architect it in a thoughtful manner, which broadly speaking means diligent use of its new Object model.

SilverStripe is the result of spending most of 2006 to reflect, and take the lessons from five prior years of pushing PHP4 to the limits (its too easy to end up with a large unmaintainable code-base), mixed with peering over the wall at RubyOnRails and liking what we tasted there.

In the same way we cherish the movement behind web standards, semantic HTML, unobstrusive javascript, and browsers like Firefox and Safari, we see PHP5 adoption as important for widely progressing web development and the user experience. While the jump from PHP4 to 5 is immense and is the primary focus, a quick review of the official PHP5 changelog shows pages of fixes and improvements, demonstrating you're being left behind if you don't migrate to 5.2, so we endorse GoPHP5's goals.

GoPHP5 asks that products drop PHP4 support in February 2008, over six months away. We did this a year ago, so look forward to the GoPHP5 initiative pushing other systems like Wordpress, Drupal and Typo3 to follow our suit ...

7 Comments. Add Yours Tags:

Post your comment

Comments

  • I think it's a good move, especially since support of PHP 4 will end this year.
    http://www.php.net/index.php#2007-07-13-1

    Posted by Philipp Krenn, 3 years ago

  • <Text>

    Posted by Niyeerck, 3 years ago

  • Chris, understand you completely, we develop on PHP5.2 but have a server running on PHP 5.1 where scripts need testing, especially for the timezone class. It can be hardwork keeping things up to date, but its worth it.

    But your point about phpBB only working on PHP4 basically points to a forum product that needs to work hard if its going to exist much longer...

    BTW, I have some more PHP 5 -> 5.2 thoughts at:
    http://www.silverstripe.com/core-team-discussion/show/2206

    Posted by Siggy, 3 years ago

  • PHP 5.x is all well and good, but when clients have applications that simply will not work on PHP 5, there's a problem. phpBB requires extra hoops to go through before it will work on PHP 5. Thankfully it's just one setting in php.ini, but other applications aren't quite so lucky.

    We're actually looking to dropping PHP all together on our colocates. We made a jump from one PHP 5 minor version to another because of "security" updates and I had to go back through all of my code and fix a variety of errors because of stealth "improvements" that sneak in with the security updates. This is code I keep around as portfolio pieces, not something I actively develop anymore.

    Posted by chris, 3 years ago

  • Larry; thanks for adding us to GoPHP5.org :)

    Posted by Siggy, 3 years ago

  • Larry... I did submit to GoPHP5 but the form said I was spam :P

    I agree with you on PHP 5.2 though. While the bigger architectural gain occurs from PHP 4 to 5 than with 5.0 to 5.2, a quick look at the php5 changelog shows a huge number of bugs and small fixes have been done, and demonstrates that by even being on 5.0 you're lagging behind. The onus is on webhosts to upgrade rather than products to maintain backward compatibility. Given our development box is PHP 5.2, we're already used to many of its features, so I'll propose we put a warning into our installer that gently informs users that if you install SilverStripe on PHP 5.1 or less that future versions of SilverStripe may not install properly. What this does is encourage downloaders to get their webhosts upgraded well before your Feb target, and means we don't need to worry with testing on lots of different PHP versions...

    Posted by Siggy, 3 years ago

  • That's great to hear, Siguard. Even if you're not supporting PHP 4 anymore, you can still help GoPHP5 by committing to PHP 5.2 in your next version and signing up on the site. A few of the projects there, like Symfony, were already on PHP 5.1 but are now helping the push to 5.2. Getting SilverStripe on board would be great.

    This page is fine as a reference page, so we just need you to sign up on the site. Hope to see you on the list soon!

    Posted by Larry Garfield, 3 years ago

RSS feed for comments on this page | RSS feed for all comments

Looking for our Open Source Software? Then head to SilverStripe.org.

Comments on this website? Please give feedback.