PHP4 Support to be dropped (Update your scripts!)

[Matt]

PHP5 to replace PHP4

The PHP development team has recently announced that PHP4 has reached its End Of Life (EOL). This means that the product will eventually no longer be maintained by the PHP development group. If the software vendor does not support their technology, it means that GlowHost will not be able to support PHP4...

From the php.net site:

"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."

What does this mean to you?
If you are running PHP4-based software, (which most of us are) it means that you should start the process to make sure your PHP4 scripts will work in PHP5. We encourage everyone to have their scripts made PHP5- compatible by January1st, 2008 as we will begin dropping support for PHP4 on the shared servers around that time, and all other servers (dedicated, VPS, Semi-Dedicated) will eventually be converted to PHP5.

ALL WEBSITE OWNERS: Please ask your programmers and developers to ensure your site is PHP5 compatible no later than January 1st, 2008.

DEDICATED SERVER OWNERS: If you are still running MySQL 4.x, we recommend that you upgrade to MySQL 5.x as soon as possible for best results with PHP5 as our managed service will only support MySQL5 and PHP5 after the 1st of the year. If you would like GlowHost to perform the MySQL 5.x update service for you, please open a ticket at our helpdesk. There is no charge for this service if you have a managed dedicated server.

Here is a link that may help some of you in the conversion process. Many of you will not need to do a thing, but we recommend that you check that your site will work well before the migration takes place.
http://www.php.net/manual/en/migration5.php

We currently have all shared servers setup for PHP5 + PHP4 so that you can test your software under PHP5 before PHP5 becomes the default version of PHP. For information on how to test your existing scripts under PHP5, please see this link.
http://www.glowhost.com/forums/showthread.php?t=751