I generally try to avoid marking a topic as an "announcement", but when something this important comes up, I figure it warrants emailing out to everyone.  Today the PHP community announced the deadline for PHP 4 support.

Today it is exactly three years ago since PHP 5 has been released. In those three years it has seen many improvements over PHP 4. PHP 5 is fast, stable & production-ready and as PHP 6 is on the way, PHP 4 will be discontinued.

The PHP development team hereby announces that support for PHP 4 will continue until the end of this year only. After 2007-12-31 there will be no more releases of PHP 4.4. We will continue to make critical security fixes available on a case-by-case basis until 2008-08-08. Please use the rest of this year to make your application suitable to run on PHP 5.

For documentation on migration for PHP 4 to PHP 5, we would like to point you to our migration guide. There is additional information available in the PHP 5.0 to PHP 5.1 and PHP 5.1 to PHP 5.2 migration guides as well.

So, what does this mean to us? As you all know, WebAdmin requires PHP 5.0.4 as a minimum version, and from time to time, concerns arise when trying to find a PHP host.  This means that from here on in the following points will most likely apply to your searches for hosts:

1. There will be many more hosts that support PHP 5
2. You may need to be cautious about your current hosts for non-webadmin projects, if they are moving from PHP 4 to PHP 5
3. If you have not made the move from PHP 4 to PHP 5 for your other projects, you may have some debugging work down the road

This is a very exciting piece of news, as it marks a dramatic shift in the web development arena! Let us know if you have any questions, concerns, or comments about the impact this may have.