PHP 4 vs. PHP 5
Top : PHP
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What are the tradeoffs between PHP 4 and PHP 5?
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While PHP 5 has a number of meaningful improvements for a PHP programmer, in some cases these improvements have come at the expense of full compatibility with PHP 4. In other words, some code developed for PHP 4 will require changes to run properly under PHP 5.
Transitioning to PHP 5
At this time, most open source software (PHPBB, Joomla, etc.) runs fine under PHP 5. While some older or poorly-written PHP code has problems under PHP 5, this seems to be the exception, and typically it is not difficult to fix such problems. We have been putting all new hosting accounts on PHP 5 servers since October 2006, and we continue to recommend PHP 5 for all new accounts. PHP 4 will be discontinued at the end of 2007, so we will be upgrading our remaining PHP 4 servers to run PHP 5 by that time.
Existing customers on a PHP 4 server who want to use PHP 5 as soon as possible can request to have their account moved to a PHP 5 server, but please keep the following in mind:
- It is time-consuming to move sites between servers, so the move will be performed as time permits. Be prepared to wait 1-3 weeks to have the move scheduled.
- Please make sure your site is compatible with PHP 5 before the move, or be willing to fix any problems that arise after the move. We want to avoid moving sites back to PHP 4 servers due to incompatibilities.
- Resellers who want to use PHP 5 may need to maintain multiple reseller accounts on different servers if some of their clients require PHP 4.
PHP 5 and register_globals
To improve security, register_globals is turned off by default on our PHP 5 servers. On our PHP 4 servers register_globals is on by default. So if you will be using PHP 5, you should make sure your code will run with register_globals turned off. For more detail, see the register_globals topic.
Choosing Between PHP 4 and PHP 5
At this time, we recommend PHP 5 for all accounts unless you know that your site contains some PHP code which is not yet compatible with PHP 5.
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