[General] PHP Upgrades

Beginning on Tuesday September 22nd we will begin upgrading all of our servers to using PHP 5.6 by default. PHP 5.6 is the latest supported version of PHP from the PHP developers and making this change will allow us to continue to operate on a supported version of PHP.

We anticipate completing these changes across all of our servers around October 15th. Essentially this means that we will be switching servers to PHP 5.6 by default between September 22 and October 15 as time allows. Some days we may switch multiple servers, other days we may not switch any servers. This is just the operating window we are looking at.

Our servers currently run PHP 5.4 by default. PHP 5.4 technically went end-of-life on September 3, 2015 meaning that it is no longer supported. Our intention isn’t to fully drop support for PHP 5.4 yet, but the move to PHP 5.6 will allow us to wean customers off of an unsupported version of PHP 5.4. PHP 5.4 support will continue to be available, at least through the end of 2015 and perhaps longer. We’ll just have to see how the adoption of PHP 5.6 carries on.

We will also be running PHP 5.5 on our servers, but we are skipping ahead and going straight to PHP 5.6 by default.

If you need PHP 5.4 or PHP 5.5 on your account, just shoot us a support ticket and we’ll be happy to switch your account over to either PHP 5.4 or PHP 5.5.

What does this change mean for me?
For the most part, you likely won’t notice any changes from upgrading to PHP 5.6 from PHP 5.6. People who develop web applications like WordPress, Joomla!, and Drupal have known about PHP 5.4’s death for some time and have released updated code to act accordingly. Reputable programmers who write plugins, components, and themes for these web application have also known about this and have long ago updated their code. So as long as you are running up to date scripts and plugins/themes/components you won’t notice any changes.

If you are a PHP programmer yourself and have custom written all of your code, then you have likely stayed in the loop regarding PHP’s versions and are aware of PHP 5.4’s death. You have probably update all of your code to facilitate these changes.

For those that want a more in-depth look at this, a list of deprecated function in PHP 5.5 include:

http://php.net/manual/en/migration55.deprecated.php
ext/mysql
preg_replace() /e modifier
datefmt_set_timezone_id()
datefmt_set_timezone()
mcrypt_cbc()
mcrypt_cfb()
mcrypt_ecb()
mcrypt_ofb()

Deprecated functions in PHP 5.6:

http://php.net/manual/en/migration56.deprecated.php
always_populate_raw_post_data
iconv.input_encoding
iconv.output_encoding
iconv.internal_encoding
mbstring.http_input
mbstring.http_output
mbstring.internal_encoding

Steven