PHP 4 is really going away now
As announced in two previous postings in July 2007 and February 2008, PHP 4 has reached the end of its development life; security issues require us to migrate to PHP 5, the currently supported version. We’ve been working on migration issues for the past several months, and we believe we can migrated based on our original target date of May 1.
To ease the transition for our users, we have devised a way to allow two web servers to co-exist on the same machine. (Geek aside: to do this, we’re using Apache’s reverse proxy directive, ProxyPass). Our current plan is to put the PHP 5 -based server into production on Wednesday, April 23 at 5:00 PM; we will continue to keep the old server running so that any sites which have problems under PHP 5 can continue to run until their code is fixed.
In most cases, code that works with PHP 4 should work with PHP 5, but there are exceptions. We know that the development framework LSCR has been using for our web team’s internally-developed applications (such as our department directory, news+events system, and course listings) does not work under PHP 5; we are in the process of migrating our code to the Zend framework. If you are one of our web customers, we will be contacting you about migrating your department’s applications to the new framework.
If you are managing your own PHP code, or your own installation of a PHP tool like WordPress or drupal, it might be a good idea to test your code on our development server, which is already running PHP 5, sometime before April 23. Mail sysadmin@LS if you’d like to get set up on the development server.
If you do nothing, your site will be migrated on April 23, and it’s possible that it will work just fine, but we would recommend that you check and test for problems. Most problems should be minor and quickly fixable; if you have major problems after the migration, contact sysadmin@LS and we can temporarily put your site back on the old server to give you time to deal with the issues.
You guys might be interested to know that the leader of the Zend Framework project (me) is a graduate of UCB. In fact, I’m a graduate of the relatively small L&S Computer Science program, so I even hail from the L&S college! It’s great to know that you guys are using (and hopefully enjoying) ZF. I think you’ll find that our use-at-will components make migration relatively simple. Of course we can’t do much about the PHP 4 to PHP 5 migration, but of course our corporate sponsor can if any departments could use a little help. I’d love to here what you’re using our framework for (I can’t tell exactly from the post)- drop me a line if you have any questions or care to give me a little more info. :)
,Wil
Comment by Wil Sinclair — April 12, 2008 @ 3:01 pm