PHP upgrading

[Timmer]

My installed version of PHP is apparently too old to meet the Olympus requirement of >= 4.3.3. So while waiting for the beta I thought I'd work on prepping my server.

My question:

Tech support tells me that 4.3.3 itself is rather old, too. They also strongly suggested not going to PHP5. They said they normally upgrade PHP to 4.3.8 or 4.3.10.

Is there any preference between these two or does it make any difference as far as Olympus is concerned?

Thanks!

[Martin Blank]

A lot depends on the OS distribution that your server runs. Current versions are 4.4.2 and 5.1.4, but you may or may not have immediate access to those without compiling them from source. So long as you meet minimum listed requirements for phpBB (4.3.3, as you mention), you should be fine.

Warnings about PHP5 are sometimes misguided. Not everything works smoothly with PHP5, so it will depend on the apps you are planning to run. If you have only your own, and you're reasonably sure that they've been tested against PHP5, then you may want to upgrade and get a little ahead of the curve. If there are doubts, it may be best to stay at the 4.x range for right now.

[magicfinger]

realistically i think php5 is not good for much except as a development environment until the web hosts decide to upgrade their servers and make php5 more wide spread, especially if you want to develop software for re-distribution.

however... if your interested in better support for OO programming, some decent iterators, sqllite and better XML support then php5 is the better choice as long as you can live with the fact that it will need to be backward compatible or be useless for the majority of your users

if you want to just run some pre-coded distributed software then stick with 4.x.x

[Anon]

In terms of olympus, both are supported, so it dosen't matter which one you choose. However, if you also intend on running phpB 2.0.x, PHP 4 is recommended

[SHS`]

For those keeping an eye on phpBB CVS commits... might has spotted the odd bug fix relating to running phpBB3 on PHP6-dev. Obviously whether PHP6 will be supported vs. compatible, shall depend on PHP's release schedule compared to phpBB's for Olypmus.