PHP4 end of life announcement, what do I need to do?

php.net has posted this announcement 13-Jul-2007:

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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: http://www.php.net/manual/en/migration5.php

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As you may already know that we provide both php4 and php5 alongside each other. We will continue to provide php4 for one more year, so that all our clients can make the conversion to php5. After that default php will be php5 on all servers.

Please test all your applications on php5 asap. Some applications may already work with php5 but following the migration guide will help in making those changes smoothly.

How can you test your applications in php5?

  1. If you are on our shared/sdx/reseller server (or if your server/vps is setup like our cpanel shared servers) with both php4 and php5, then you can activate and use php5 alongside php4 to test your applications. Please read this KB: http://www.jaguarpc.com/support/kbase/710.html

    or

  2. You can setup your own test environment using XAMPP on your home/office PC.

IMPORTANT NOTES:

1) You have one year from today (13-Jul-2007) to make this switch to php5. Once again, please note that your application may already work in php5 or may need just little tweaks here and there to migrate to php5.

2) If you are not sure and did not develop the application, please check with the developer(s) of the application or hire a php developer to test