When I first read about this on the Drupal mailing lists a week ago I kind of waved it off as being a good idea but not something many PHP content management system projects would be interested in. The idea is to make a unified, concentrated effort to drop PHP4 support and drive PHP5 adoption in the year 2008. Think of it. All CMS, forum and framework projects going completly over to PHP5 on a set date! This would be like a bomb dropping on the web hosting world and cause ripples throughout the open source world.

There are open source php CMS projects like ezPublish that have not joined in on getting ready for PHP5 and then there are others like Typo3 and Drupal that are ready to push the button for choice b. PHP5 and not a. PHP4 or c. All of the above. If powerhouses like Wordpress and Joomla join in then PHP4 will be history. The PHP developers can then rejoice as their world becomes clearer and much easier to live in. Here is a first draft of the proposal.

PHP 4 has served the web developer community for seven years now, and served
it well. However, it also shows its age. Most of PHP 4's shortcomings have
been addressed by PHP 5, released three years ago, but the transition from
PHP 4 to PHP 5 has been slow for a number of reasons.

PHP developers cannot leverage PHP 5's full potential without dropping support
for PHP 4, but PHP 4 is still installed on a majority of shared web hosts and
users would then be forced to switch to a different application. Web hosts
cannot upgrade their servers to PHP 5 without making it impossible for their
users to run PHP 4-targeted web apps, and have no incentive to go to the
effort of testing and deploying PHP 5 while most web apps are still
compatible with PHP 4 and the PHP development team still provides maintenance
support for PHP 4. The PHP development team, of course, can't drop
maintenance support for PHP 4 while most web hosts still run PHP 4.

It is a dangerous cycle, and one that needs to be broken. The open source PHP
developer community has decided that it is indeed now time to move forward,
together. Therefore, the listed open source PHP projects have all agreed
that effective 5 February 2008, any new feature release will have a minimum
required PHP version no older than PHP 5.2.0. It is our believe that this
will allow web hosts a reason to upgrade and the PHP development team the
ability to retire PHP 4 and focus efforts on PHP 5 and the forthcoming PHP 6,
all without penalizing any existing project for being "first out of the
gate".

The PHP community is taking this effort very seriously as can be seen by the emails being sent to project leads.

Brion:
Some of my friends in the open-source CMS community have created a
movement called "GoPHP5" which will eventually reside at GoPHP5.org.
We're trying to encourage projects to -- as of February 2008 -- drop
support for versions of PHP prior to 5.2. This would not mean older
versions that support PHP 4 would be abandoned, just that new releases
would only officially support PHP >= 5.2.

This is an effort to have web hosts support modern PHP versions. Right
now, there is little incentive for web hosts to upgrade because so many
web applications support PHP 4 and old versions of PHP 5.

We'd like to get MediaWiki on-board. Because the current version of
MediaWiki already requires PHP 5 and runs on PHP 5.2 without problems,
this would not be as jarring to MediaWiki as it would be to projects
that still release new PHP 4-compatible versions. Currently, we're in
talks with Drupal, Joomla, CakePHP, Symfony (already in), Symfony's
partner projects, Gallery, and WordPress.

Thanks,
David

There are a lot of doubts as to if PHP will die. In an earlier column here at Hiveminds we spoke of how PHP itself might be at the end of its development cycle. Similar to how C language ended and then C++. Perl seems to be the first loosely typed web language to suffer from this. In his blog the Drupal founder Dries Buytaert talks about the PHP5 adoption rate being very low and that this might be a sign that PHP is dieing.

The control panel choke hold

Well PHP may not be dieing but is certainly being killed. Web hosting and server control panel companies like Direct Admin and CPanel are choking PHP. By not doing active development and pushing PHP5 adoption they are killing the one language that may save them from Ruby on Rails hell. If PHP dies or goes into the mists the way that Perl and Python have as web languages then ASP.NET and Ruby on Rails will gain a significant part of the orphaned popularity. The problem with this is that they are both very hard to set up in a shared hosting environment. If we remove ASP.NET as a contender because of it licensing and costs then Ruby on Rails will be the new champ.

Ruby on Rails may also put many control panel software manufactures in the red. In the last 3 years none of them have be able to successfully produce a product that gives the same easy web server administration as PHP does and all seem to refuse to even try and get PHP5 working. If the drive for PHP5 works and these software companies are not able to produce a working solution then web hosting companies will build their own solutions. This will not make the sales department at these companies very happy.

Red Hat is a Cruel(Don) King!

One problem that this effort will face is the corporate world and its use of large and "dependable" web hosting companies. These companies usually use some Linux Red Hat derivative. Red Hat is notorious for shipping the wrong PHP version. Their idea of what is stable is what they had available when the updates were written. There are long waits for PHP version updates to hit the update server. While PHP 5.2 has been out for some time now and proven to be stable, Red Hat still ships with PHP 5.1. As there were some critical changes in PHP5 between these versions the Go PHP5 campaign will be targeting PHP version.5.2. This means that Red Hat OS hosters may loose some business. This may in turn cause a backlash against PHP usage. Not a good situation. PHP needs to continue to grow in the eyes of the corporate world if it is to survive these bad times.

CGI will make a comeback

If this effort by the open source PHP software world fails or never happens then I think you will see a big turn back to the traditional CGI programming. CGI programming is actually the next phase of Web 2.0 but PHP is standing in the way. Fast and friendly web development is what makes PHP the choice over using CGI. The one hurdle that CGI had as the best web development solution has been solved. by the increasing popularity of FastCGI. While Ruby on Rails may be hard to implement in a adminstration control panel. FastCGI implementation will be cake and produce an immediate effect on how web software is created. FastCGI will make just about any language AJAX friendly. PHP as a CGI language would face some serious competion and in most cases would be last on any list of choices.

This is Huge!

With 2007 being a big turning point for jobs in the PHP web development arena the future of PHP becomes a very important thing to look at in open source software creation. It is the PHP communities way of flexing their muscles in a similar way that VB developers did when VB6 was changed by Microsoft. Hopefully the outcome of this fight will have better results. Possibly hundreds of thousands of jobs may be dependant on PHP maintaining a strong hold in the world of web software. A grassroots movement like GoPHP5 could be the start of a new beginning. But if it does not work it could be the beginning of the end for PHP.

Happy Publishing!

With ten years of experience in web development he spends most of his work day developing in PHP,mySQL and Drupal
Carl McDade - Systems Developer