Nov

WordPress 2.7-PHP5 Required? If Not it Should Be.

If you were to ask the developers of WordPress if the up and coming version 2.7 required PHP5 to run correctly they might tell you well…no, but…

And it’s a big ‘but’ believe me.

If any version of WordPress ever came out yelling that it’s PHP 5 or nothing, this is it. It doesn’t even pay to think otherwise. If you’re still running your WordPress site on PHP 4 and intend to upgrade to 2.7 then you’ll need to do whatever you have to do to switch over to PHP 5 beforehand and not just for making sure 2.7 runs smoothly and efficiently either and here’s why.

PHP 4 is dead. It died on 12/31/07 but people just refuse to let it rest in peace. The fact that some hosts still offer PHP 4 (and they shouldn’t) is irrelevant, it’s still dead and what’s more, it’s a security hazard as well.

Actually, PHP 4’s status is what is known as “deprecated” which, if you go by the strict definition, doesn’t make that much sense but simply put it means that all development of PHP 4.4.* ceased as of the above date with all subsequent security updates ending on 08/08/08. If that means nothing to you then consider that each security update is tacked onto the end of the version number (4.4.*) such as 4.4.1, 4.4.2 and so on. By the time August 8th of this year rolled around there had been 9 separate security updates patched onto PHP 4.4.*, the last one rolling out on 08/07/08 strangely enough.

No matter how you look at it, that’s still a bit over one security flaw per month that had to be patched and the developers patched the last “hole” the day before all support ended. The important thing to realize here is that it’s now past the middle of November and the PHP developers stopped supporting PHP 4.4 altogether over 3 moths ago. If things are still running true to form here (and there’s not one reason to believe they aren’t), that means PHP 4.4.9 should have at least 3 new security flaws that are wide open to attack and it’s only going to get worse from there.

WordPress 2.7 is right around the corner and with it comes an entirely reworked Admin that is a huge improvement on any previous version of WordPress and a host of new features and functions. And for all intensive purposes it takes PHP 5 to run it properly no matter what you might hear to the contrary (and I’ll be surprised if you hear much). That, plus the fact that most plugin authors have been coding their plugins for PHP 5 for awhile now and many of these plugins do not run using PHP 4 or will not in the very near future. So if your intending to upgrade to what is most likely the best version of WordPress yet, make sure you’re running PHP 5 (currently at 5.2.6) before you do.

Dissenting opinions welcome of course but not likely to convince me otherwise.