Update on PHP 4 end of life
I posted last July that PHP 4 is nearing the end of its life, and that therefore we must begin migrating our sites to PHP 5. PHP 5 is largely compatible with PHP 4, but I expect that most sites based on older code will need at least some modification to work properly under PHP 5.
The final version of PHP 4, version 4.4.8, was released in January and was recently installed on our main web server. The PHP development team has committed to providing security patches for 4.4.8 until this August; after August, using PHP 4 will be a violation of the campus minimum security standards. That situation gives us a fairly hard deadline for migration, and we’d like to be migrated well before then.
We have set up a development web server running Apache 2.2.8 and PHP 5.2.5 to allow departments to test their sites with PHP 5. Contact sysadmin@LS if you are interested in getting set up on the development server.
Our target date for cutting over to PHP 5 will be May 1, 2008. At that time, we’ll put PHP 5 in production on our main server, and any of your PHP code which is incompatible with PHP 5 will break. I expect that most sites will continue to work fine, with perhaps some small glitches, but it’s impossible to know unless you test your code beforehand.
We’ll be sending more communications about this change-over as it approaches.
