Director’s Blog
PHP 4 end of life

The PHP project recently announced that PHP 4 has reached the end of its life. PHP is a programming language commonly used for web pages; PHP 4 is the version installed on our main web server (LS.berkeley.edu, also known as “clue”), which provides web hosting for about 30 L&S departments. Version 4 will continue to be supported through the end of calendar 2007; after that time, the PHP project will provide only critical security updates.

Our plan will be to migrate our server to PHP 5 before the end of the year. In most cases, this should not cause big problems for our users, but there are some language differences between PHP 4 and PHP 5 which could cause some old pages to break.

We will be providing more information as we develop a migration plan. For now, if your pages use PHP, you should check to see whether they work under PHP 5. We will have a staging environment ready before the migration so you can test your code before we go live with the new version.