How long with PHP4 be supported?

[Cath-info]

PHP4 has reached EOL (end of life) and is no longer supported by the developers. Only the most critical of bugfixes will be released between now and August 08, at which point they will no longer touch PHP4 at all.

Large webhosts are in the process of "forced upgrading" of their users to PHP5.

My question is: When will cPanel stop providing/supporting PHP4?

And is it possible to install a dual environment (where you can set up 2 Apache handlers and select between them for each website)

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php5 .php .inc .htm

OR

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php4 .php .inc .htm


Thanks,

Matthew

[cPanelDavidG]

PHP4 has reached EOL (end of life) and is no longer supported by the developers. Only the most critical of bugfixes will be released between now and August 08, at which point they will no longer touch PHP4 at all.

Large webhosts are in the process of "forced upgrading" of their users to PHP5.

My question is: When will cPanel stop providing/supporting PHP4?

And is it possible to install a dual environment (where you can set up 2 Apache handlers and select between them for each website)

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php5 .php .inc .htm

OR

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php4 .php .inc .htm


Thanks,

Matthew

Yes, concurrent PHP is supported. When you go to WHM -> Software -> Apache Update to use EasyApache, simply check both PHP 4 and PHP 5 when prompted for which version(s) of PHP to use.

As for when PHP 4 support will be discontinued: we will likely continue to support PHP 4 until security issues with the final version of PHP 4 are discovered and remain unpatched by the PHP project, or until there is insufficient demand to warrant the continuation of PHP 4 support.

For example, FrontPage Extensions has been EOL'd for a while now, but we continue to support it because there aren't any major known security issues with it and demand for that support remains strong.

However, as a PHP programmer myself, I very strongly recommend migrating all users to PHP 5 as soon as possible (using concurrency as a means of transition). After 8/8/08, it will likely be a bad idea to continue using PHP 4. Additionally, more and more scripts are going PHP 5 only (they will not work on PHP 4) so users will likely want to be on PHP 5 simply so they can use the latest and coolest scripts.

Remember, there isn't much difference (from a compatibility standpoint) between PHP 4 and PHP 5 (from a PHP 4 perspective). The vast majority of PHP 4 scripts will work in PHP 5. It's the distributed scripts that haven't been maintained in years (and thus likely to have security issues anyway) and custom-built scripts that are most susceptible to not working in PHP 5.