It's July the 8th. Today I realized that we're exactly one month away from 8-8-8, the final blow to PHP4.

August 8th marks the point when nothing (at all) will be done to any version of PHP4 again. Full support ended back in December of 2007 with no new versions being released. 8-8-08 marks the end of that as well and PHP4 developers that discover bugs may not be able to get them fixed.

Ivo sums it it perfectly:

I'm not trying to scare you. No wait, I am. Don't let 8-8-8 become the PHP community's 6-6-6 and abandon PHP4 while you still can.

Thanks to the hard work of Elizabeth, Marco, and all the others at php|architect, my new book, php|architect's Guide to PHP 5 Migration has been released.

The book aims to be the only one you'll need when it comes to guiding you and your applications from the PHP4 dark ages up to the world of PHP5. You can order your copy directly from php|architect - the Print/PDF combo for about $33 CAD and the PDF only for around $30 CAD.

The issues range from weird page layouts, to some controls not working, to some errors popping up here and there, and probably your blog not even displaying. This occurs because even though WordPress is PHP5 compatible, some of the plugins you are using might not be.

In his case, it was the wp-cache plugin that was causing the problems. Permissions weren't right to allow it to do its job. This resulted in problems rendering content and with the site acting as it normally would. His solution involved disabling and reenabling the plugin after deleting the cache and lock file the plugin uses.

• PHP 5 set record of growth : + 2,5%, up to 32%
• PHP 5.2 is the second most popular version, ahead of 4.3.
• PHP 4.4.8's popularity is falling

You can check out the numbers yourself for the month as well as the evolution stats showing how things are progressing. He's also added a new graph this month showing the adoption rate that PHP5 is having in the online world.

PHP 4.0.0 added main/logo.h which contains the logos themselves (as text (a bunch of numbers (magic))) so I checked out every version of this file from CVS, parsed them to create the images, sorted by version/size, then wrote this blog post.

When the language started out there wasn't much in the way of a logo until PHP3 came around. Philip shows some of these early prototypes (most of which look nothing like the familiar purple oval of today). Things evolved with PHP4 and jokes were even played with the area inside the shape - everything from developers and dogs to bunnies showed up at different times of year or with special URLs.

New php-4.4.8 packages are available for Slackware 10.2 and 11.0 to fix security issues. More details about the issues may be found here: http://bugs.php.net/43010.

You can download it from their FTP sites, two versions for each of the most recent distributions: Slackware 10.2 and Slackware 11.0

• PHP 5 displays strong growth, almost at 30%
• PHP 5.2 will be more popular than PHP 4.3 before April
• PHP 5.2.5 is already the dominating version of PHP 5
• PHP 4.4.8 not so popular

You can get the full details on this month's statistics from the full list of the statistics and the evolution posted on Nexen.

In this final tutorial of the series I'm going to show you how to manually trigger a destructor, and in addition you'll learn how to emulate the behavior of this magic method when using PHP 4.

They not only talk about how to call the destructor manually but they also show how to call multiple destructors at the same time to destroy lots of objects at once. And, as promised, they include a method for being able to use a destructor-like bit of functionality in a PHP4 app as well.

If you purchase a cheap hosting account with many of the major web hosts around today, chances are they will be running PHP 4. The problem for web hosts is this: the PHP community may have moved on from version 4, but a lot of the code out there hasn't.

He recommends one solution that several hosting providers are starting to gravitate towards - offering both to their customers and allowing them to switch between them (via something like cPanel).